In Honor of 150 Years: Classic Papers from the British Medical Journal, Highly Cited from 1945 to 1989

In recent years our citation-based studies have included aseries ofessays discussing highly cited classics from prestigious medicaljoumals. Among these journals are the Annals of Internal Medicine, ~JAMA-Journal of the American Medical Association,2 Lancet,3 and the New England Journa[of Medicine.4 In a 1987 essay, we discussed 101 highly cited papers from the British Medical Journal (BMJ).5 This year, the BMJ marks its 150th year of publication. From its beginnings in 1840 as the organ of Britain’s Provincial Medical Association (which by 1857 had enlarged sufficiently to become the British Medical Association), the BMJ IS now the third largest general medical journal in the world. In this year of the journal’s sesquicentennial anniversary, science writer and editor Bernard Dixon used data from the Science Citafion Index@ (SCP) to examine 50 papers from the BMJ that were the most cited between 1945 and 1989. His discussion, which appeared in the CJctooer 3 issue of the BMJ, is reprinted in the following pages.b There is only a siight difference in the time span covered by Dixon”s study (papers cited between 1945 and 1989) and our 1987 examination of BMJ papers (1955 to 1985), so it is not surprising that there is a high degree of overlap between the two studies. In fact, of the 50 papers considered by Dixon, 48 appeared among the 101 highly cited papers we identified in 1987. One of the exceptions, a 1941 paper on crush injuries and renal faihrre,T ilhrstrates how world events can affect citation patterns. Discussing a syndrome first identified in air-raid victims during World War II, the article— October 29, 1990