The Johann Jakob Wepfer Award 2010 of the European Stroke Conference to Professor Jan van Gijn

The quantitative analysis of the Web of Science yielded 422 scientific publications attributed to Jan between 1969 and 2010. These articles have been cited in excess of 18,900 times. Many of the articles have been in journals with extremely high impact factors. The Web of Science classified the papers as covering an extraordinarily wide range of domains (the number in brackets that follows each subject is the number of publications covering that field): clinical neurology (328), peripheral vascular disease (127), surgery (93), medicine, general and internal (64), psychiatry (61), neurosciences (30), radiology and medical imaging (10), neuroimaging (6), haematology (5), cardiac and cardiovascular systems (4) ... and the list goes on. His most recent publication in 2010 relates to very interesting observations on the nature of chronic pain, a subject which is becoming increasingly important in the field of stroke rehabilitation. The quantitative analysis depends very much on the question being asked. If one asks the artificial question ‘is van Gijn a better scientist than Wepfer?’, it would seem reasonable to apply a test of statistical significance to the number of citations of the Background and Introduction