Leading life science assay kits: top 100 cited products, 2024 update
5
Min Read
In this blog:
- Which companies are supporting researchers with highly cited life science research kits?
- What are the trends in assay kit usage in scientific research?
- Download the top 100 cited kits data!
We’re officially kicking off the 2024 ‘top 100 most cited reagent’ series, covering antibodies, assay kits, bioactive small molecules, cell lines and growth factors! In this blog series, we take a look at the most referenced products in the scientific literature to help understand market trends, and which companies are supporting the most science.
Today we are delving into the life science assay kit market. We currently hold citation data on >900k kits & assays, including ELISA kits, flow cytometry kits, lateral flow assays, multiplex immunoassays and more from over 380 suppliers.
From our database, we have extracted the top 100 most referenced kits from publications in 2023. We found:
- Products from 18 different companies
- Cell Proliferation and Viability, Nucleic acid Synthesis and Amplification kits as popular kit types
- Leading companies including Thermo Scientific, Promega and Beyotime Biotechnology.
Read more of our analysis and download the data for yourself below!
Who are the leading life science kit companies?
Supplying highly cited assay kits is an indication of a vendor’s dominance in the space or in their kit niche. This data can help you benchmark company performance and identify key market players.
The top three kits suppliers
Drilling down into the top 100 dataset showed that Thermo Scientific topped the list with 34 kits appearing. They have managed to increase their dominance in the kits space, with 4 more products compared to our analysis of popular research kits in 2022.
In fact, three of the top 10 most cited assay kits of 2023 were supplied by Thermo Scientific.
We recently took a look back at reagent data trends spanning the last decade, and found that Thermo had the greatest citation share for kits & assays over the past ten years. This gives further evidence that they are consistently chosen by scientists for life science kit solutions.
Promega and Beyotime Biotechnology also feature prominently. They supplied 13 and 10 of the top 100 assay kits, respectively.
It is worth noting that Promega has increased the number of kits that featured in the top 100 list to move into the top three.
By providing kits that are cited widely in publications, these companies are helping researchers generate results and accelerate their work.
Competition at the top
Interestingly, we found that the leading three suppliers in the top 100 kits of 2023 list differ slightly from last year’s analysis, which was different again to the top three assay kits companies in 2020.
For these leading suppliers, we saw gains and losses in the number of life science kits featuring in the top 100 over the years. Given these fluctuations, could we expect to see more competition and shifts in rank in the future?
Top life science kit suppliers in the 2023 dataset outside of the top three included New England Biolabs and Vector Laboratories, in position four and five.
It is worth noting that Vector Laboratories have grown the number of kits in the top 100 to pull them into the top five, and have two assay kits in the top 10.
Who are the research assay kits companies to watch?
Evolving research needs are being met by a variety of products and companies. Data on company growth can help you identify broader assay kit market trends and potential competitors.
We noticed a number of companies with kits products garnering more citations in 2023.
Illumina entered the top 100 dataset this year. Their Nextera XT DNA Library Preparation Kit (FC-131-1096) came in at rank 39 and their TruSeq RNA Library Preparation Kit v2, Set A (RS-122-2001) at rank 72. Illumina are a key player in this market, with a well established reputation in sequencing.
We noticed several other industry leaders increasing their presence the top 100, including: BD biosciences, Qiagen and R&D Systems. This data seems to suggest that many established players are seeing success in the assay kits market, growing in and dominating the top 100.
You can see the full selection of companies featuring by downloading the data at the bottom of this blog.
Which life science research kit types are highly cited?
Changes in product citation numbers give an indication of assay kit research trends. This can enable you to spot gaps or opportunities for your company portfolio.
The top three life science research kits
In the assay kits market, we found that the top three cited kits have remained the same for several years. With an impressive >94,000 citations, Qiagen’s RNeasy Mini Kit takes the top spot.
Joining them in the top three is the Pierce™ BCA Protein Assay Kit from Thermo Scientific, and the PrimeScript RT Reagent Kit with gDNA Eraser from Takara Bio.
Assay kits increasing their citation share
We noticed the Dual-Luciferase® Reporter Assay System (E1910) from Promega climbed up the rankings this year to 4th spot.
We also found the BD Pharmingen™ FITC Annexin V Apoptosis Detection Kit I entered the top ten this year, as well as the RNase-Free DNase Set from Qiagen.
Popular assay kit types
11 nucleic acid synthesis kits appeared in the top 100 list, with 39 nucleic acid related kits.
This is a slight drop from last year, which saw over half of the kits being nucleic acid related. This could indicate research needs being fulfilled by other kit types.
Other popular kit types were Amplification Kits and Cell Proliferation and Viability kits. Get in touch if you would like more details on these individual kit types.
What were the most used ELISA kits of 2023?
In a competitive section of the wider assay kit market, data on which ELISA tests are highly cited can help in spotting trends to inform your own ELISA kit development.
Although we have focused on the wider kits market for the purpose of this blog, ELISA kits remain the largest part of our kits database and a sector of interest to many suppliers.
Last year saw four ELISA kits feature in the top 100 most cited list. This year that number had risen to six. Crystal Chem supplied the most widely cited ELISA kit.
R&D Systems supplied four out of the top six ELISA kits. In our recent blog looking at ten years worth of data, we commented on R&D’s market leading citation share in ELISA kits, which aligns with this data.
The top three products were all ELISA kits which recognise mouse proteins.
To dig further into the ELISA kit market, we offer a Market Insights package for suppliers of all sizes. This package include quarterly structured datasets covering:
- Countries
- Companies
- Top ELISA kit products
- 14 different research areas
You can find out more about the ELISA kit market insights package in our recent blog.
Wrap-up: Our summary, the data we used for this analysis and downloading the top 100 list yourself!
Citations are a marker of trust in a product and represent a past product sale – they are certainly worth paying attention to for your company.
For this analysis of our citation data, here’s some of the key takeaways:
- Specific kits and companies moved up or entered the top 100 list for the first time
- A growing number of ELISA kits featured in the top 100
- Wide research use was noted for Cell Proliferation and Viability, Nucleic acid Synthesis and Amplification kits
You may be wondering where our citation data comes from.
At CiteAb, we collect data on product use from pre-prints, open-access and closed-access journals using AI-driven text mining combined with human reviewing. We have used this tech to build our kits & assays database, which now covers 60 different kits types, including Sequencing kits, Enzyme Activity kits, Conjugation/Labelling and many more.
For the download below, we have taken data from our kits database for 2023. We are giving away the product code, name, company, kit type and rank for the top 100 kits for your own analysis.
Finally, sign up to our newsletter below and follow us on social media to be let know when we release our next top 100 analysis, which will be covering growth factors!
- Rhys and CiteAb team
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