Which of the world's institutions employ the most highly cited researchers? An analysis of the data from highlycited.com
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Which of the world's institutions employ the most highly cited researchers? An analysis of the data from highlycited.com
Lutz Bornmann* & Johann Bauer** * corresponding author: Division for Science and Innovation Studies Administrative Headquarters of the Max Planck Society Hofgartenstr. 8, 80539 Munich, Germany. Email: [email protected] ** Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry Am Klopferspitz 18, 82152 Martinsried, Germany. EMail: [email protected] 2
Abstract
A few weeks ago, Thomson Reuters published a list of the highly cited researchers worldwide (highlycited.com). Since the data is freely available for downloading and includes the names of the researchers’ institutions, we produced a ranking of the institutions on the basis of the number of highly cited researchers per institution. This ranking is intended to be a helpful amendment of other available institutional rankings.
Keywords highlycited.com; institutional ranking 3 In 2014, Thomson Reuters published a list of the highly cited researchers worldwide (highlycited.com). This list was also published in a report (Thomson Reuters, 2014) and the data can be downloaded as an Excel file for further statistical analyses. Thus Myklebust (2014), for example, used the data to undertake a breakdown by country of the distribution of the researchers. In order to identify the highly cited researchers, Thomson Reuters (provider of the Web of Science) selected, in a first analysis step, the publications from the natural and social sciences with document type "article" and "review" and publication years between 2002 and 2012. Then, they determined those publications which belonged to the top 1% by citations in their subject area and publication year. In a second analysis step, the authors of these highly cited publications were sorted by the discipline (e.g. Materials Science; see http://in-cites.com/thresholds-citation.html). In a third analysis step, a ranking was set up within a discipline: The more highly cited publications there were for a researcher, the higher his or her rank in the discipline. In the list of the highly cited researchers published in the URL above and the report mentioned above, those researchers are listed whose rank is less than or equal to the square root of the population consisting of all researchers in a discipline with at least one highly cited publication. A total of 3215 researchers appear in the list of highly cited researchers. These are 3215 rows representing appearances of researchers and their institutions because of selection in one or more disciplines. Apparently the actual number of unique researchers is 3073. In this study, we investigated the global distribution of highly cited researchers across institutions. For this evaluation, an elaborate cleaning process was necessary, since many institutions were not consistently named by their authors, but with several variants of their Disciplines are sets of journals in which the highly cited publications appeared.
Science
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank David Pendlebury from Thomson Reuters for recommendations to improve the manuscript. The comparison of our lists of highly cited researchers per institution with his lists led to very similar results. Initial differences between the lists have been resolved accordingly. 10
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