Citation analysis of the scientific publications of Britton Chance in ISI citation indexes

Abstract

Britton Chance was a pioneer in many scientific fields such as enzymatic reaction kinetics, bioenergetics, metabolism, in vivo NMR, and biophotonics. As an engineer, physical chemist, physicist, physiologist, biophysicist, biochemist, innovator and educator, he had worked in diversified fields over extended periods between 1926 until his death in 2010, at the age of 97. In order to illustrate his scientific career and great impact on research from a new perspective, we employ scientometric analysis tools to analyze the publications of Britton Chance with data downloaded from the ISI Citation Indexes in April 2013. We included articles, reviews and proceeding papers but excluded meeting abstracts. In total, we obtained 1023 publication records with 1236 authors in 266 journals with 17,114 citations from 1945 to 2013. We show the annual publications and citations that Britton Chance received from 1945 to 2013, and generate HistCite maps on the basis of the global citations (GCS) and local (self) citations (LCS) to show the citation relationships among the top-30 publications of Britton Chance. Metabolism and the development of physical methods to probe it appear to be the connecting thread of the lifelong research of Britton Chance. Furthermore, we generate the journal map and co-authorship map to show the broad scope of research topics and collaborators and the high impacts of the scientific oeuvre of Britton Chance ranging from physics, engineering, chemistry and biology to medicine.