UC Irvine

The scientific productivity of Drosophila-related research among researchers, countries, institutions, journals, and subject areas was investigated by a bibliometric analysis of Drosophila research from 1900 to 2008. The search includes the Pub Med, using the keywords listed in the medical subject headings thesaurus, and the Science Citation Index databases with the word Drosophila in the title. From Pub Med 36,486 documents were obtained, whereas a total of 48,981 documents were obtained from Science Citation Index. 76.9% of the documents are research papers, mostly (95.2%) written in English, and (55.8%) produced in the United States. The study includes 4,600 institutions and 45,415 author names. Most prolific are 34 authors, who account for 9% of the articles published, with more than 100 research papers produced by each author. We considered 1,648 journals; 60 of them (3.6%) published 66% of the articles. Genetics is the main journal most used for Drosophila research publications (9.9%). Genetics and heredity as well as biochemistry, molecular biology, and cell biology are the dominant research subjects. We compare research in Drosophila melanogaster with 10 other organisms, frequently used as biological models: Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cereviseae, Arabidopsis thaliana, Zea mays, Neurospora crassa, Dictyostelium discoideum, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, Caenorhabditis elegans, Schizosaccharomyces pombe, and Danio rerio. Escherichia coli is the most extensively used model organism for genetics research since 1950, with 94,873 documents. Keywords: Fruit fly, history, genetics, biological experimental models, SCI, Pub Med.