2 papers of Julie Thompson in the 100 most-cited research papers of all time

In a recent article published in Nature (www.nature.com/news/the-top-100-papers-1.16224),  Thomson Reuter’s Web of Science was asked to list the 100 most highly cited papers of all time. The search included articles published in the scientific literature, social sciences, arts and humanities, from 1900 to the present day. The exercise revealed that it takes a staggering 12,119 citations to rank in the top 100 — and that many of the world’s most famous papers do not make the cut. In fact, the vast majority of the top 100 describe experimental methods or software that have become essential in their fields. For decades, this list has been dominated by protein biochemistry, and notably papers describing bioinformatics methods to analyse genetic sequences.

A paper published by one of the researchers at ICube, Julie Thompson (BFO team), is currently number 10 on this list. It describes the ClustalW programme that allows researchers to describe the evolutionary relationships between sequences from different organisms, to find matches among seemingly unrelated sequences and to predict how a change at a specific point in a gene or protein might affect its function. Another paper by the same author on a later version called ClustalX is number 28 on the list. Nature concludes with one powerful lesson for researchers: “If citations are what you want, devising a method that makes it possible for people to do the experiments they want at all, or more easily, will get you a lot further than, say, discovering the secret of the Universe”.