Lars Grimelius and his silver impregnation method—Commentaries on the paper in Upsala Journal of Medical Sciences with the highest number of citations

Abstract

Citation counting is a comparably new procedure that has become widely used to evaluate single papers but also to rank journals by the so-called impact factor (IF), often determined to the third decimal. This is a phenomenon of the information society and therefore only reliable for later years. However, we can go back to the 1960s. When doing so for Upsala Journal of Medical Sciences, there is one paper which has been cited much more than any other, and that is Lars Grimelius’s ‘A Silver Nitrate Stain for a2 Cells in Human Pancreatic Islets’, published in the journal in 1968 (1). According to the Thomson Reuters database it has been cited 897 times to date. None of the journal’s other papers is even close to that record. The value would have been even higher if the method had not been incorporated in many laboratories as a routine staining for which a citation was regarded as unnecessary.