nodalpoint.org - Information Theory - Comments

Is bioinformatics a field?

Neil — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 02:09:19 -0400

I think it's difficult to rank researchers in "bioinformatics", because it's not really a research field. This is one of the major problems that we have in bridging the divide between computational and wet-lab biologists - the latter group see bioinformatics as a field, when in fact it's really a collection of mathematical, statistical and computational methods.

Your study is useful in that it highlights current inadequacies in ranking. How do we classify a bioinformatics researcher? If I include "bioinformatics" as a keyword in my paper, does that make it a bioinformatics paper? Just because I used BLAST or Clustal in there somewhere? How about people who work with genomes? They'll use a variety of computational methods, but is their main focus the methods or the biology of the genome under study? I'd argue the latter.

It helps to distinguish "bioinformatics" from "computational biology". There are a lot of people using the former and a very few people making advances with the latter. The names that you mentioned are certainly people who have applied novel algorithms to aid the classification and analysis of biological data (mostly structural data in those cases).

What of the many people who have input into tool development - things like the Bio* projects, or Gbrowse, or HMMER, or the many useful databases such as Pfam, InterPro, SuperFamily? Does it really make sense to rank those people based on who the first and last authors were? I would argue that it doesn't.

This is why many of us feel that the bioinformatics era, with its ethos of open source, global collaboration, public data and true cross-disciplinary approaches is rather at odds with the old-school way of doing science (become head of lab, choose niche, make name, cultivate ego). In other words, I'm not sure that ranking individuals really means a lot in this brave new world.

Having said that there certainly are influential individuals - let me nominate Lincoln Stein, Sean Eddy and Ewan Birney as examples. Contributions by these people and many others are measured by far more than citations.

M Katoh has certainly gamed

ionchannels — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 00:41:04 -0400

M Katoh has certainly gamed my ranking algorithm. As mentioned by others, the journals are highly suspect and he even publishes many of these "articles" using a second M Katoh (his wife??) in the author list to get double credit for each publication. Sander, Thornton, and Bork should be considered the true top 3 in bioinformatics research. What do others think are the most influential scientists in this field?

Greg, I was referring to the

ionchannels — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 15:54:52 -0400

Greg, I was referring to the scientist ranking system http://www.biolicious.com/rankings.php. Those are good suggestions for the literature browser, thanks...

Bioinformatics top researcher

chris — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 14:48:15 -0400

I notice that our old friend M Katoh tops the PI list for bioinformatics...

I notice that the site

Greg — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 13:40:15 -0400

I notice that the site navigation is a little different, but other than that how has the site changed since you last posted it ? I recall that the previous version also had a citation ranking system. How do you do the ranking ? is there a way to combine tags ? e.g. bioinformatics+transcription+factors ? in the same way that delicious does ? what about relevance ?

Also some of the tags on the stem cells tag cloud page seem to be messing the last letter e.g. angiogenesi, centrosom, cultur, imag...

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