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Thursday, 5 May 2011

The University gave a ‘high five' to its ‘Hi Ci' staff and  students last month with a reception in the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.

The event toasted 35 UWA academics and postgraduate students who authored some of the world's most highly cited academic papers in 2009, as well as celebrating Highly Cited Researchers.

Highly Cited Researchers are identified by Thomson Reuters, the international industry leader in publications information, as among the top 250 most highly cited authorities across 22 broad fields of study.

UWA currently has 14 affiliated Hi Ci researchers. Thomson Reuters' list of Highly Cited Researchers is an integral part of the Academic Ranking of World Universities produced by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Thomson Reuters published its 2009 list at the end of last year, naming 22 papers produced at UWA as some of the most highly cited pieces of research.

Highly cited papers represent the top one per cent of papers. UWA 's most successful papers were in the field of plant and animal research, with six making the coveted list. Four papers produced by UWA academics in clinical medicine, two in environment and ecology and two in molecular biology and genetics were also at the top.

Individual papers in agricultural sciences, biology and biochemistry, engineering, geosciences, physics, psychology and psychiatry, social sciences, and space science completed the list.

Some papers were written by very small groups, such as the psychology winner, submitted by Professor Colin MacLeod and two of his students. Others, such as a physics paper on gravity research, published in the prestigious journal, Nature , had more than 700 authors.

Winthrop Professor David Blair and 13 members of his gravity wave research group were among several hundred authors who are all members of the international Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Professor Blair said LIGO members were from 61 institutions around the world, and 34 Australians were authors in the paper Upper Limit On the Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background of Cosmological Origin .

"Gravity wave detectors are among the biggest and the most sensitive instruments in the world, capable of measuring the smallest amounts of energy possible, but they are incredibly complicated and produce a vast amount of frighteningly complicated data," Professor Blair said.

"All 834 members of LIGO play a role in operating the detectors in the US and in contributing to papers written using the data. Initially a paper might be written by an individual or a small group, but it goes through a rigorous comment and review process. All members who take part in this process, as long as they satisfy certain requirements, get to be part of the authorship."

At the other end of the scale, Professor MacLeod joined the Hi Ci list as co-author with his PhD student, Russell Bridle and Honours student, Jacey See . Jacey was the lead author, with the work on anxiety part of her Honours thesis.

"I always try to involve PhD students in supervising Honours students, and Russell had an input into Jacey's supervision," Professor MacLeod said. Their paper, The Reduction of Anxiety Vulnerability Through the Modification of Attentional Bias was published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology .

Clinical Professor Steven Webb , in Medicine and Pharmacology at RPH, appeared twice in the highly-cited list.

He was the lead author of a paper on Critical Care Services and 2009 H1N1 Influenza in Australia and New Zealand , published in The New England Journal of Medicine . He was a co-author on another swine flu research paper in the online Journal of the American Medical Association: Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation for 2009 Influenza A (H1N1) Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome .

In the former paper, Professor Webb wrote that planning for the treatment of infection with the 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) virus through health care systems in developed countries during winter in the northern hemisphere was hampered by a lack of information from similar health care systems in the southern hemisphere.

"The 2009 H1N1 virus had a substantial effect on intensive care units during the winter in Australia and New Zealand," he wrote. "Our data can now assist planning for the treatment of patients during the winter in the northern hemisphere."

One of the six highly successful publications from plant and animal science was: Karrikins Discovered in Smoke Trigger Arabidopsis Seed Germination by a Mechanism Requiring Gibberellic Acid Synthesis and Light in the most highly-cited plant journal, Plant Physiology.

"The work is highly-cited because it is exciting and novel," said co-author Winthrop Professor Steve Smith from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Energy Biology. "People can relate to fires and smoke and it's a good new story about regeneration after the devastation of bush fires."

Professor Smith said that when the paper was accepted, the authors offered the journal some beautiful photographs of WA native seed, which appeared on the journal cover, helping to draw attention to their work.

"Among the people attracted to our work is Dr Winslow Briggs, one of the most eminent plant biologists in the world and Director of the Carnegie Institute at Stanford University," he said. Dr Briggs was one of several karrikin researchers at a meeting at UWA which prevented Professor Smith and his co-authors from attending the highly-cited celebration.

Another academic who could not attend the reception, Professor Grant Morahan , said he was unaware that he had been listed as a highly-cited author, even though he is one of the world's leading type 1 diabetes researchers. He thought he had been invited to celebrate the success of his colleague, Adjunct Professor Patrick Holt, from the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research.

Professor Morahan, head of the Centre for Diabetes Research at WAIMR , was one of a type 1 Diabetes Genetics Consortium which published its research in Nature Genetics .

"I would guess the paper was highly-cited because people want to know what causes type 1 diabetes," he said. "Before this, the genes that cause the disease have been reported one at a time. This paper reported 16 genes at one time.

"Hundreds of scientists around the world work in the consortium but only a few worked on this paper. Our next one will be even more highly-cited!"

Professor Robyn Owens , Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) said that highly cited researchers were recognised internationally as generators of new knowledge of interest, relevance, and importance.

"Because of the high value placed on Highly Cited researchers in the international market, UWA gains considerable reputation and prestige by having them on staff," Professor Owens said. "And individual staff who write papers that are highly-cited demonstrate their capacity to create new knowledge that is picked up and recognised at the level of the top one per cent of their field. Having highly cited authors shows that UWA is indeed creating world class knowledge.

Published in UWA News , 2 May 2011

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