Thomson Reuters Publishes List of Most Influential Scientists

Thomson Reuters, the leading company providing information for professional markets, has released a list of the world’s most influential scientific minds. To identify the researchers with the strongest impact in their field of study, Thomson Reuters assessed the most cited papers of the last 11 years in 24 domains of natural and social sciences. The company’s bibliometric experts analyzed science performance metrics from  InCites Essential Science Indicators (ESI), a component of Web of Science.

The list of most influential scientific minds is compiled every year from the Highly Cited Researchers website, which features information from ESI. Among other metrics, Thomson Reuters follows the top 1% most cited papers of each year in every field of study. Some fields have a much larger number of papers and citations than others. For example, Clinical Medicine accounts for 12% of the total database content, whereas Economics & Business represents only 2%. The size of each field was factored into thresholds that determined how many authors to include from each field or how many highly cited papers were necessary for an author to be included in the list.

Contributions varied vastly between countries, with US institutions producing 50% of the cited researchers. The top three most represented affiliations where the University of California, Harvard University and the National Institutes of Health.

The hot papers: looking at the last two years

In addition to the study of the most prominent researchers of the last decade, Thomson Reuters published a list of the 19 more cited researchers in the last two years. These authors are cited immediately after publication, and cover extremely trendy fields and topics.

 

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Source: Thomson Reuters