In response to the recently released 'The Hottest Research of 2011' report from ScienceWatch, bioinformatics lecturer Dr Paul Gardner from the University of Canterbury decided to take a look at New Zealand's hottest research and researchers.
His results revealed that the hottest researcher, with 14 'hot' papers, and 337 citations to papers from 2010 to 2012 was Professor Ian Reid from the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at The University of Auckland.
Professor Reid has a long association with the HRC and is currently first named investigator on two programmes, including 'Mechanisms and management of musculoskeletal disease'.
Another HRC-funded researcher, Professor Allan Herbison from the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Otago, was not far behind in third place, with 11 hot papers and 179 citations to papers from 2010 to 2012.
Here's how Dr Gardner calculated the results:
- using Scopus find institutes with New Zealand affiliations, taking the 19 most prolific institutes, ranging from The University of Auckland to Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research
- filter the documents from these institutes by publication date (2010-2012) and sort the list by number of citations
- select those articles with 10 or more citations
- remove articles with 20 or more authors
- write a simple bit of Perl that will parse the author names and count the number of articles and total citations for each
- remove the high-ranked authors from outside New Zealand
- make a scatter plot of number of hot articles vs number of citations to hot article
- peruse the results and 'Google-stalk' the successful authors.
To see Dr Gardner's full results, check out his RNA Bioinformatics blog.