United States National Labs: How Does Their Research Measure Up?

Editor's Note: An article on page 1 of this issue addresses the government officials, and the United States public concerning ongoing funding and focus of the major national weapons labs-- Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia. The article points out that this shift, in fact, marks a time of vast change for all Department of Energy-managed labs, as the quest for global economic gain supplants the fear of global war as the prime reason for continued support of these facilities. Among the mo

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Earlier this year, the newsletter Science Watch, published by the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia, undertook to evaluate through citation analysis the influence that the largest national labs have had on research during the past decade. The newsletter compared the labs' citation records in several categories--physical as well as life sciences--weighing the impact of their published work against one another, and also against the impact of all U.S.-published papers in these fields. A report on this study appeared in the March 1993 issue of Science Watch. It is reprinted here with the permission of the newsletter and of ISI.

For some time now, the national laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) have been the subject of increasing scrutiny. Policymakers are openly questioning the necessity of funding the weapons labs--Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos--at the same levels as during the 1980s, when the threat from the ...

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