Editor's note: Citation Classics Commentaries were written by the authors of some of the studies that were the most highly cited papers between 1961 and 1975. The essays were originally published between 1977 and 1993 in Current Contents, a publication of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now Thomson Scientific. (ISI was founded by Eugene Garfield, also the founder of The Scientist.) In this edited essay, published in 1979, neuropharmacologist Arvid Carlsson recalls a 1958 paper describing a method for quantifying adrenaline and noradrenalin in tissue extracts.
Arvid Carlsson developed this technique for analyzing adrenaline and noradrenaline levels at the University of Lund, Sweden. The study was cited almost 1,200 times, according to ISI. "The method was quite precise and we had good evidence of both the specificity and sensitivity. That's the reason why I think it became widely used," Carlsson recently told The Scientist. "Now ...
