Bovine spongiform encephalopathy,
colloquially known as mad cow disease, is a neurodegenerative disease
that was first documented in the UK in 1986. Its spread is thought to
be linked to cannibalistic practices in the livestock feed industry,
in which the meat and bone meal of infected animals were used as a
protein source in feed for healthy animals. According to the USDA’s
Animal and Planet Health Inspection Service, there have been upwards
of 180,000 cases to date. Over 95% of these cases were reported in the
UK, but infected cattle have also been diagnosed in various other
European and Asian countries. Mad cow is part of a family of
transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, which include scrapie of
sheep, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), kuru, and
Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker syndrome in humans. In 1996, a new form
of CJD known as variant CJD began to crop up in humans. Evidence for a
link between mad cow disease and variant CJD was published by various
research groups. Many of the papers in our Special Topic on Mad Cow
and Other Prion Diseases discuss the possible causal relationship
between mad cow and variant CJD. Several other papers in the top 20
explore the molecular biology of prions and their role as a causative
agent in these pathologies. Diagnostic methods, patterns of incidence,
molecular analyses, and species barrier studies round out the top
articles in our analysis.
Methodology
To construct this database,
papers were extracted based on a TOPIC search for Mad Cow. The keywords used were as follows:
- mad cow
- bovine
spongiform encephalopathy
The baseline time span for this database
is 1993-2003. The resulting database contained 1,282 papers; 2,394 authors;
46 countries; 487 journals; and 799 institutions.
Rankings
Once the database was in place,
it was used to generate the lists of top 20 papers, authors, journals,
institutions, and nations, covering a time span of 1993-2003.
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:
14, 15, 4, and 7, respectively.
