Norwich scientists top world rankings

Michael Pollitt, agricultural editorScientists in Norfolk are world-beaters - and that's the official verdict of the global research community.Michael Pollitt, agricultural editor

Scientists in Norfolk are world-beaters - and that's the official verdict of the global research community.

Norwich Research Park topped the league table of more than 88,000 institutions around the world even pushing Cambridge University into 10th place.

The 2,700 scientists, which includes researchers at the University of East Anglia, published the most influential papers in plant and animal science in the past 10 years and were cited more than 42,000 times in other research papers.

And in the centenary year of the John Innes Centre at Colney, its scientific findings were ranked significantly higher than any other organisation in the world. Researchers at the John Innes and the Sainsbury Laboratory published in 1,134 scientific journals in the

decade to December 2009.

Norwich was streets ahead of the nearest rival in Japan with 27.5. and Cambridge, which was in tenth place, logged 13.3. A leading German institution was third and America's University of California at San Diego was in fourth place.

'This is a great accolade for the JIC and Sainsbury Laboratory, and it's great news for the Norwich Research Park and UK science in general,' said Prof Michael Bevan.

'It's a mark of the research done by our scientists that we have managed to get so many highly-regarded papers published in top journals. It's a real testament to the quality of science here and the fantastic support and resources we have in Norwich, ' said Prof Bevan, who is acting director of the JIC.