How an Irish Biochemist became the most cited computer scientist

Dr Desmond Higgins's work merges two disciplines at what has become a very active area of research—bioinformatics.

An Irish biochemist holds the unusual distinction of being the most cited computer scientist in the world. Although he isn't even a computer scientist. This is one of a number of "citation" records held by Dr Des Higgins, a lecturer in the Department of Biochemistry at University College Cork.

A citation occurs when a scientist publishing research work in a journal mentions earlier work by another scientist in the list of references. A US company, the Institute for Scientific Information, catalogues citation "scores" and publishes them in a citation index. It lists Dr Higgins as the most cited computer scientist and the seventh most cited molecular biologist.

He is co-author on a 1994 paper with J.D. Thompson and T.J. Gibson, ranked as the number one paper for citations in any discipline published over the past 10 years. Two papers published while at Trinity College and one at UCC together have collected 6,000 citations for Dr Higgins, and his current running total for citations stands at about 14,500.

"It is quite bizarre," Dr Higgins says of the citation game. "It is a measure of the impact of your work, but it is a crude and poor measure. People can overrate citations, but people like it because it is an easy thing to measure."

His enormous catch of references occurs because his work merges two disciplines at what has become a very active research interface—bioinformatics. This refers to the use of computer power to help decipher the complexities of the human genetic blueprint, DNA. The 1994 paper described a computer programme called CLUSTAL W. "That particular paper is about a technique that biologists use to check DNA sequences. It was explaining a program we wrote," he says.

"I am a biologist by training but have been using computers since 1980. My PhD was in zoology in Trinity. For that I had to write a lot of computer programs in numerical taxonomy. Even though I was a biologist, I was working with computers. This has now hit the headlines in a big way through bioinformatics." He needed a computer program that could make comparisons between DNA sequences, cataloguing similarities and differences. CLUSTAL was the result and the program now ranks as the second most commonly used software in DNA analysis.

When CLUSTAL was first developed the research team at Trinity's Department of Genetics gave it away free. "When we did that there was no money to be made," says Dr Higgins. This in turn made it extremely valuable and attractive to other researchers working in DNA analysis so CLUSTAL became a standard for this research.

BLAST is the most often used bioinformatics software. It takes a single given strand of DNA, enough to represent a single gene, and searches for matches anywhere else in the rest of an organism's genome. The DNA of other species can also be searched for matches, a common occurrence because nature has conserved many duplicate genes across species.

The human genome project showed that there are about 40,000 genes in our DNA each producing a unique protein. Yet "every gene in the human genome has many relatives", says Dr Higgins. CLUSTAL helps find these relatives and can spot differences between them.

His ongoing work involves further development of the multiple alignment method, finding ways to do more simultaneous alignments with longer DNA or amino acid strings. "We have to develop methods that are faster and more powerful," he says.

Thursday, 4 July 2002
Dr Desmond Higgins

UCC Department of Biochemistry: http://www.ucc.ie/academic/biochemistry/
TCD Genetics Department: http://www.tcd.ie/Genetics/
Institute for Scientific Information: http://www.isinet.com/

J.D. Thompson, D.G. Higgins and T.J Gibson, (1994) CLUSTAL W: Improving the sensitivity of progressive multiple sequence alignment through sequence-weighting, position-specific gap penalties and weight matrix choice, Nucleic Acids Research 22(22), 4673–80.
Nucleic Acids Research: http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/22/22/4673