Medical science is for the big players. Bio-medical and clinical research is expensive, intensive and fast-moving and huge resources - in equipment and teams of people - are required to make an impact in an area where the stakes are high to come up with new treatments and therapies and where key breakthroughs in a major disease can make a scientist into an international name.
Outstanding performance over a long period by the UK Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) at Cambridge has been recognised in one of the greatest global concentrations of Nobel prize winners and the presence of Fred Sanger - the only double-Nobel laureate in the world. On average, each LMB paper in the ISI database has been cited 36.34 times, which is more than seven times the world average of 5.15 citations per paper in this field.
The Max Planck Institutes (MPIs) next in the list have smaller numbers of very high quality papers. The Max Planck organisation is the core of the German research system, often allied to, but separate from, university research groups. Its staff are dedicated researchers, unlike UK and north American academics who have many other duties.
The relative volume of outputs for English-speaking and non-English institutions is important. The international language of research is English, so increasing numbers of scientists from non-anglophone countries publish in anglophone journals. But few English scientists publish in German journals. That means there is intense competition to get into the top anglophone journals such as Nature in the UK and Science in the United States.
These German papers represent the very best of Max Planck activity, while a significant proportion of German papers are not actually in the ISI database. The citation rates for some of these other papers may be lower, so the MPI impact measures may represent the peak of their performance whereas for the UK and USA the measures take into account both peak and platform.
The best American performance is from MIT and Rockefeller, with outstanding average impact on a huge volume of activity. The major names of US research - Caltech, Scripps, Princeton, Harvard, Brandeis and Stanford - are close behind. The huge USA National Laboratories also have a markedly high impact in this area, although this is not their prime focus. It does, however, indicate the importance of the contribution that these powerful facilities can make at the cutting edge of biological and medical research.
The Babraham Institute is part of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and has a particular record in molecular biology using animal models. It is no coincidence that it is located near Cambridge and close to the LMB. The universities of Cambridge and Oxford and University College London then follow close behind.
