A paper published by Philip Cohen and his colleagues in the October 2000 issue of the Biochemical Journal (Davies et al, (2000) Biochem, J., 307, 95-105) is featured as a 'Hot Paper' in the 2 September 2002 issue of The Scientist magazine (Volume 16, Issue 17) which is published by the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information (ISI).

The featured paper has already been cited 205 times, less than two years after it was published (Hot Papers are defined as those which are cited 50-100 times more often than the average paper of the same type and age).

The paper analyses the specificities of 28 commercially available inhibitors of protein kinases and lays out guidelines for validating the data obtained from the use of kinase inhibitors. The information in the paper has turned out to be extremely valuable to other scientists trying to decide whether compounds purported to be specific inhibitors of protein kinases in Company catalogues are any good or not. Many of the compounds tested turned out to be absolutely hopeless! Since publication of the paper, Philip has been deluged with letters thanking him for publishing this information and messages from others noting that 'It's a pity you didn't publish this paper a couple of years ago, it would have saved me wasting a lot of time.'

Read the commentary on Philip's paper here