Angiogenesis is the stimulation of blood vessel production, specifically, the formation of channels lined with endothelial tissue. It has both normal and pathological roles in the body. Angiogenic stimulation results in embryonic vascular development, normal organ and tissue growth, tissue repair, response to ischemia, and primary tumor and metastases growth. Angiogenesis is controlled by a combination of factors that stimulate blood vessel growth or inhibit or modulate the growth.

The ongoing discovery of these factors, along with experiments using drugs that can stimulate or inhibit angiogenesis, has led to exploration of means of manipulating angiogenic processes to impede tumor growth or metastasis, and stimulate increased vascularization of ischemic limbs or of the heart after heart attack.

Special Topics has analyzed the literature on angiogenesis published within the last 10 years, with additional attention to highly cited papers published within the last two years. The top 20 papers over the last decade tend to cover the basic science in the field. Included among the research topics are how angiogenesis works; the regulators of angiogenesis, such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF)-1 alpha, which stimulate angiogenesis; and the anti-angiogenesis factors angiostatin, endostatin, and thrombospondin-1. One early paper studied the drug thalidomide as an angiogenesis inhibitor. This work has led to numerous clinical trials of thalidomide in multiple myeloma and other cancers. As for more recent literature, the top 20 papers published since 2002 tend to look at animal models of angiogenesis and angiogenic inhibition, such as the interrelationship between neurogenesis and angiogenesis in adult songbird brains, or clinical and preclinical studies, on the roles of statins, stem cell implants, or angiogenic growth factors in stimulating or inhibiting angiogenesis. Six of these papers are reviews, the most-cited of which covers angiogenesis inhibitors as cancer chemotherapeutics.

Methodology

To construct this database, papers were extracted based on title-supplied keywords for Angiogenesis. The keywords used were as follows: 

angiogenesis
-or-
anti-angiogenesis

The baseline time span for this database is 1994-2004 (second bimonthly). The resulting database contained 7,241 (10 years) and  2,667 (2 years and 4 months) papers; 19,698 authors; 60 countries; 977 journals; and 3,032 institutions.

Rankings

Once the database was in place, it was used to generate the lists of top 20 papers (two, and ten years periods), authors, journals, institutions, and nations, covering a time span of 1994-2004 (second bimonthly).

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 used to determine scientist, institution, country, and journal rankings according to total cites/paper were as follows: 13, 47, 13, and 26, respectively. These thresholds correspond to the top 1% of authors, 1% of institutions, 50% of countries and 5% of journals by total papers.

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