Coming second

I have just discovered that two of my papers have made the top 50 most cited papers published in Blood. One is the V genes paper, published in 1999. This came in at 22. The other is the International Prognostic Scoring System for MDS which was published in 1997, and which came 38th.

I'm not surprized by the V genes paper which is an important landmark in CLL research. The IPSS paper is highly quoted because it is one of those papers thatsets a standard that virtually has to be adhered to in all series in which MDS is treated. Peter Greenberg was the instigator of this paper, but I wrote the first paper that proposed a prognostic scoring system for MDS. This was the Bournemouth Score published in 1985 and itself highly cited. Following our example several other groups suggested other scoring systems, and what Peter Greenberg did was to gather us all together in Chicago, so that we could thrash out a system to which we could all adhere.

Coming 22nd and 38th doesn't sound much, but when one thinks of how many papers are published in Blood one is encouraged. I rememeber in my final year at school I came 13th in the cross country out of several hundred boys who ran. Ofcourse I was much bigger than many of them, and the previous year I had come 113th. It certainly makes England's performance in the Ashes series sound better. After all they came second.