The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds
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Every year upwards of 9 million scientists and scholars publish their findings in academic journals producing papers that, according to some estimates, likely number in excess of 2 million.
With such prodigious output, the task of qualifying the value of each piece of work is challenging. Nevertheless, the research community, publishers, academic administrators and others seek such designation, beyond who has the highest salaries, biggest laboratories or office shelves with the most awards.
One strategy is to concentrate on the research papers themselves—specifically, the extent to which they have assisted, inspired or challenged other researchers. Papers meeting this standard earn a clear distinction when other authors explicitly footnote, or cite, the reports in their subsequent work. A paper that other authors have frequently cited has quantifiably proved itself to be significant.
Extending this logic provides a clear avenue: to seek out authors who have consistently produced papers which have, in turn, won peer approval in the form of high citation counts.
This approach is embodied in the latest Thomson Reuters report on “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds,” covering the main areas of science and the social sciences, presenting the researchers who, in their respective fields, have contributed markedly high numbers of top-cited papers over a recent ten-year period. The report also includes a section on the world’s “hottest” scientists, whose work within the last two years has been cited at a notably rapid clip.
The Top 1%
Compiled annually, the “Most Influential Scientific Minds” report reflects data from the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researchers website, with publication and citation figures drawn from Essential Science Indicators (ESI), a component of the Web of Science. Among its assorted features and metrics, ESI tracks papers published in the last decade that rank in the top 1% most cited for their respective years of publication in each of 22 main subject fields. These reports, officially designated as “Highly Cited Papers,” numbered more than 120,000 in a recent analysis covering the years 2003 to 2013.
Thomson Reuters analysts identified author names listed on multiple reports within each ESI field. (Each paper is assigned to only one field, depending on the journal in which it appeared. Any paper published in a multidisciplinary journal, such as Science or Nature, is assigned based on algorithmic analysis of the literature predominantly cited by the paper, as well as of the journals which subsequently cited the report. For example, a Science paper that mostly cites immunology reports, and is in turn cited by papers published in immunology journals, would be assigned to the field of Immunology.)
Once the papers have been accurately attributed, the authors are listed within each ESI field according to the number of Highly Cited Papers to their credit. In all, the current listing of Highly Cited Researchers features more than 3,100 names.
Size Matters
The specialty areas covered by ESI differ drastically in size. That is, some fields are characterized by greater numbers of journals, in which larger populations of authors publish more papers, and therefore greater quantities of Highly Cited Papers. For example, the field of Clinical Medicine is the largest in ESI, accounting for about 12% of the database’s total content. Economics & Business, meanwhile, contributes just over 2%.
The relative size of each ESI field, in terms of the overall number of Highly Cited Papers, was factored into the thresholds that determined how many authors to feature in each field. Varying thresholds are also included in determining how many Highly Cited Papers were required to qualify a given author.
Figure 1 reflects the variance in the size and the corresponding yield of Highly Cited Researchers for the top 10 of the 21 ESI fields, showing the number of authors within each area. Clinical Medicine, as noted earlier, is unmistakably predominant.
Figure 1:Top 10 Most-Represented Fields, Based on Number of Highly Cited Researchers
(SOURCE: Thomson Reuters Web of Science/Essential Science Indicators)
National Representation
Of the 3,126 Highly Cited Researchers in the 2015 listings, 1,563 represent US-based institutions—exactly 50%. The United Kingdom followed at some distance, with Germany and China also registering strongly. Figure 2 represents a breakdown by nation.
Figure 2:Top 10 Most-Represented Countries, Based on Number of Highly Cited Researchers
(SOURCE: Thomson Reuters Web of Science/Essential Science Indicators)
Institutions
Some institutions proved to be notably prolific in hosting Highly Cited Researchers, as Table 1 indicates.
Again, size is a factor, as several of the entities represent large university systems or national research agencies with many component facilities. The University of California, which boasts the greatest number of names, with 165, is an example, as are the US National Institutes of Health and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Still, some smaller players emerged, such as Washington University in St. Louis, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thanks to their researchers contributing to several highly cited genomics papers, both organizations can claim upwards of two-dozen Highly Cited Researchers.
Rank
Primary Listed Affiliation
Number
1
University of California System, USA
165
2
Harvard University, USA
98
3
National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA
85
4
Stanford University, USA
60
5
University of London, UK
49
6
Max Planck Society, Germany
44
7
University of Texas System, USA
40
7
Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
40
9
Duke University, USA
33
10
University of Oxford, UK
28
10
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA
28
10
European Molecular Biology Lab, UK, Germany
28
10
Northwestern University, USA
28
14
Washington University in St. Louis, USA
27
15
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, USA
26
16
University of Michigan, USA
25
16
Princeton University, USA
25
18
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, USA
24
18
University of Cambridge, UK
24
20
Erasmus University, Netherlands
22
20
University of Washington, USA
22
20
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK
22
*Note: Institutional figures were correct as of late 2015. Subsequent updates by researchers may result in minor changes.
Table 1: Institutions with the Most Highly Cited Researchers
(SOURCE: Thomson Reuters Web of Science/Essential Science Indicators)
Citation-Based Measurement
Tabulating the most highly cited papers is just one of several possible citation-based measurements for assessing a researcher’s impact. Another approach is to gauge “relative impact” by comparing a citations-per-paper tally against a field-wide baseline. No single approach is ideally comprehensive in scope or outcome, and any scheme will likely exclude accomplished, deserving researchers who do not happen to meet the criteria at hand.
The measure used for identifying Highly Cited Researchers, however, has the advantage of reflecting recent contributions that may come from early- or mid-career researchers, rather than relying on an overall citation count, a measure that tends to favor authors whose work has had many years in which to accumulate citations.
Today’s “Hot” Researchers
Along with featuring Highly Cited Authors and their decade-long run of markedly significant papers, the “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” report also identifies a much smaller selection of authors whose recent work has resulted in a high number of what are called Hot Papers. These reports, two years old and younger, attract citations almost immediately after publication, collecting cites at a rate far above papers of comparable type and age in the same journals.
There are 19 such authors whose recent research has proved to be of immediate interest and utility, aka Hot Papers. The scientists—representing such fields as genomics, public health and renewable-energy research—are featured in Table 2.
Name
Institution
Field
Number of Hot Papers
Stacey B. Gabriel
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Genomics
25
Henry J. Snaith
Oxford University
Physics/Materials
24
Christopher J. Murray
University of Washington
Global Health
22
Eric S. Lander
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Genomics
21
Gad Getz
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Genomics
20
Matthew Meyerson
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Genomics
19
Michael Grätzel
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Materials
19
David (Xiong Wen) Lou
Nanyang Technological University
Chemistry/Materials
19
Alan D. Lopez
University of Melbourne
Health Metrics
16
Theo Vos
University of Washington
Global Health
16
Mohammed K. Nazeeruddin
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Materials
16
Hua Zhang
Nanyang Technological University
Materials
16
Mohsen Naghavi
University of Washington
Global Health
15
Yang Yang
Univ. of California, Los Angeles
Materials
15
Yi Cui
Stanford University
Materials
15
Michael S. Lawrence
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Genomics
14
Scott L. Carter
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Genomics
14
Kristian Cibulskis
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Genomics
14
Feng Zhang
MIT
Biomedical Engineering
14
Table 2: Researchers with the Most Recent Hot Papers – the Hottest of the Hot
((SOURCE: Thomson Reuters Web of Science/Essential Science Indicators)
Undeniably, Highly Cited Researchers and the latest selection of “hot” authors have demonstrated that their work is central to current, ongoing research across the range of scholarly and scientific advancement and that they are the ones to watch.
