Stanford University has recently published an update of the list of the top 2% most widely cited scientists, the World’s Top 2% Scientists. This ranking, considered the most prestigious worldwide, is based on the bibliometric information contained in the Scopus database and includes more than 160,000 researchers from the more than 8 million scientists considered to be active worldwide, with 22 scientific fields and 176 subfields taken into account.
The Stanford ranking is based on a composite citation index (c) that excludes self-citations and considers the position of researchers in the authorship of papers, with emphasis on single, first and last authorship. The same index including self-citations is provided for comparison. The c-scores have been calculated for the period 1996-2020 (career) and also for the year 2020 alone (single year). The full database is available at Mendeley Data (Elsevier).
Now that I am facing the last years of my scientific career it is very encouraging to realize that I have been listed in the World’s Top 2% Scientists, specifically within the top 0.5 %, considering all fields and subfields of research. Regarding specialties, I occupy the number 173 of a total of 19,448 paleontologists and I am among the top-12 palynologists listed in this section, together with outstanding scholars such as John Birks, Keith Bennett, Polychronis Tzedakis, Peter Kershaw, Vera Markgraf or Herbert Wright, just to cite some.
Original reference
Ioannidis, P.A., Boyack, K.W. & Baas, J. 2020. Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicatords. PLOS Biology 18, e3000918.
Latest update
Baas, J., Boyack, K. & Ioannidis, J. 2021. August 2021 data-update for “Updated science-wide autor databases of standradized citation indicators”. Mendeley Data, v3.
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