During its centenary year in 1987, scientists and policymakers alike hailed the National Institutes of Health as the "crown jewel" of the U.S. government's biomedical research enterprise. And today, despite administrative problems, such as complaints of noncompetitive pay for senior investigators and occasional public embarrassments, such as undisclosed conflicts of interest (see Science 248:676, 1990), NIH is still home to some of the world's most distinguished biomedical scientists.
The Scientist was quickly able to identify 10 NIH researchers in its recently compiled list of most-cited scientists of the 1980s. This list is derived from the files of the Science Citation Index, published by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia. Those whose names appear in the accompanying table all rank among the 100 most-cited scientists of the period 1981-88 - that's the top 100 out of more than 1.3 million scientists whose citation histories were reviewed. In other words, ...
