Citations in the early scientific papers

Now we are in the realms of Kremlinology, but lets proceed anyway to analyse the citations in the early Chinese papers.

What puzzles me is the inconsistency of citation in the following papers (papers that I've already mentioned on this blog):

1. Structure and reactions of arteannuin, published May 1979
2. Antimalaria studies on qinghaosu, published December 1979
3. Crystal structure and absolute configuration of qinghaosu, pubished March 1980

What's curious is that the 1980 paper doesn't cite the 1979 papers (see picture for list of references in the 1980 paper), nor does the December 1979 paper cite the May 1979 paper. Most obviously, why doesn't the 1980 paper cite the May 1979 paper, as both are on similar topics?

What could be the explanation for these inconsistencies? It seems to me there are two possibilities.

First possibility: the authors of the 1980 paper - and we don't know their names because the paper went out under an anonymous byline of the Institute of Biophysics - didn't know about Tu Youyou 屠呦呦 and Zhou Weishan 周維善 and the other authors of the May 1979 paper.

Second possibility: we are in much darker waters, where the authors of the 1980 paper did know about Tu and Zhou but deliberately avoided citing them.

Either way, it would tend to suggest that, far from being a highly coordinated project (as it is often thought to have been), it was a bit disorganized, with different (rival?) groups publishing their results pretty much independently.

青蒿情黃花香

A very interesting blog called 青蒿情黃花香, in other words, "Qinghao - news and views on the yellow flower", referred to me. (For those who don't know, Artemisia annua sports rather pretty yellow blooms.)

It's nice to know a Chinese person is reading my blog, and what's more, is interested in the history of qinghaosu and what people outside China think about the discovery.

青蒿情黃花香 says that my blog is "a mixture of fact and speculation", so lets get on with the facts and speculation...

Who should get the Nobel Prize?

I thought I'd wrap up today's discussion with this provocative question, which I'll discuss in more detail in later posts.

My citation would be: For their analytical work leading to the discovery of artemisinin.

Based on the record of published scientific works, two Chinese scientists should get the prize. They are: Tu Youyou 屠呦呦 and Zhou Weishan 周維善.

But, as a Nobel can go to three people, I'd give the final third of the prize to Milutin Stefanovic. He may not have known the chemical could cure malaria, but he beat the Chinese to the printing press.

There's a precedent for this: Jerome Horwitz gets the credit for developing the anti-HIV drug AZT, even though he synthesized the chemical long before HIV came on the scene. Like Stefanovic, he could never have dreamed his chemical would later help millions of people.

Now let's pull these conclusions apart again and see where we get...