News Release

Six of the top nine most cited physics and astrophysics articles of 2005 were authored by researchers now in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, according to the SPIRES database of Stanford University.

Of the cited articles, Charles L. Bennett's papers — which pinpointed the age and composition of the universe — ranked first and second. Those of Adam Riess, who headed up the team that discovered the mysterious dark energy that is driving objects in the universe apart, ranked fifth and eighth. Two articles by Raman Sundrum, a physicist whose work opened new dimensions in space and time, ranked seventh and ninth.

"These rankings reflect the exciting science being done at the interface of physics and astronomy, and the leading role of Johns Hopkins scientists in that effort," said Jonathan Bagger, chair of the department in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

Bennett came to Johns Hopkins in 2005 from his previous position as a senior scientist for experimental cosmology at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and Riess joined the faculty on Jan. 1, 2006, from the Space Telescope Science. Sundrum arrived in the summer of 2000 from a postdoctoral position at Stanford University.

The SPIRES database offers researchers worldwide a compendium of papers on physics and astrophysics, and tracks citations of those papers by other scientific articles. Citation totals are considered an indication of the influence of a scientist's work on others in his or her discipline.