UF pharmacy professor’s paper ranks No. 2 in citations this century

A simple yet elegant equation published by a University of Florida professor nearly 25 years ago has earned a place among the most influential scientific works of the century.

The 2001 publication co-authored by Thomas Schmittgen, Ph.D., chair of pharmaceutics in the UF College of Pharmacy, has garnered nearly 150,000 citations in the Web of Science database, securing its place as the second most-cited research article of the 21st century and the fifth most-cited publication of all time, according to Nature.

The paper introduced a now widely used approach for gene expression analysis and was co-authored by Schmittgen while he was an assistant professor at the Washington State University College of Pharmacy. He collaborated with Kenneth Livak, Ph.D., a pioneer in the field of quantitative polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, to publish the study in the journal Methods.