Abstract
In a recent study published in this journal it was claimed that the rate of publications from US-based authors in the human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research field was slowing or even declining from 2008 to 2010. It was assumed that this is the result of long-term effects of the Bush administration’s funding policy for hESC research and the uncertain policy environment of recent years. In the present study, we analyzed a pool of more than 1,700 original hESC research papers published world-wide from 2007 to 2011. In contrast to the previous study, our results do not support the hypothesis of a decline in the productivity of US-based research but rather confirm a nearly unchanged leading position of US research in the hESC field with respect to both publication numbers and impact of research. Moreover, we analyzed about 500 papers reporting original research involving human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) published through 2011 and found a dominant position of US research in this research field as well.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s12015-012-9409-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
The question how the effects of the federal US funding policy for human embryonic stem cell research can be measured is a matter of debate
We observed a slight slowdown in the increase of paper numbers from 2009 to 2011, which might be due to a shift of the scientific interest to human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) in the years after 2007
There has been some controversy on the effects of regulatory policies on human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research output and about the reasons for the preferred usage of an only restricted set of hESC lines [2,3,4, 6, 7, 10, 12]
Summary
The question how the effects of the federal US funding policy for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research can be measured is a matter of debate. Several studies claimed that the Bush administration’s funding policy was causative for the preferential use of only a few hESC lines, namely Wicell’s H1 and H9 lines [5,6,7], while we have shown that the preferential use of certain hESC lines is independent of a nation’s stem cell policy [4]. In a recent paper published in this journal and entitled “The Race Is On: Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Goes Global”, regional differences in hESC lineage use and a decrease in studies from US-based research groups were reported for a period spanning from 2008 to 2010 [9]. Inter alia it was assumed that lingering effects of the prohibitive stem cell funding policies between 2001 and 2008 and an uncertain policy environment of the first half of the Obama
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