The goal of microfluidic devices is to do for biology, chemistry,
and medicine what microfabricated integrated circuits have done for
computation—to reduce by orders of magnitude the time, space, power
and labor needed for any procedure. These devices, first fabricated
in the early 1990s, integrate microscale pumps, valves, and channels
to manipulate nanoliter or even picoliter amounts of fluid and
reagents. Eventual applications include everything from
lab-on-a-chip sensors and assays, both biological and chemical, to
drug dispensing and even miniaturized heat-exchange devices to cool
integrated circuits.
The list of most-cited papers from the past decade is led, not
surprisingly, by reviews of the theory and technologies and by
discussions of materials and fabrication techniques as
soft-lithography imprinting techniques came to dominate over
silicon-based micromachining.
The two-year list of highly cited papers documents the evolution
of the field from general principles to specific applications.
Highly cited papers from the last two years include reports of the
development of microfluidic-based assays for real-time observation
of protein expression, for sorting mammalian and culturing cells,
and for immunosensor systems.
Methodology
To construct this database,
papers were extracted based on topic-supplied keywords for
Microfluidic Devices. The keywords used were as follows:
"microfluid*"
The baseline time span for this database
is 1997-June 30, 2007 (third bimonthly period of 2007). The resulting database contained
5,174 (10 years)
and 2,920 (2 years) papers; 11,022 authors;
58 countries; 640 journals; and 1,900 institutions.
Rankings
Once the database was in place,
it was used to generate the lists of top 20 papers (two- and ten-year
periods), authors, journals,
institutions, and nations, covering a time span of 1997-June 30, 2007
(third bimonthly period of 2007, a 10-year plus 6-month period).
The top 20 papers are ranked
according to total cites. Rankings for author, journal, institution,
and country are listed in three ways: according to total cites, total
papers, and total cites/paper. The paper thresholds and corresponding
percentages used to determine
scientist, institution, country, and journal rankings according to
total cites/paper, and total papers respectively are as follows:
| Entity: |
Scientists |
Institutions |
Countries |
Journals |
| Thresholds: |
18 |
47 |
13 |
12 |
| Percentage: |
1% |
1% |
50% |
10% |
