The big story of last month’s global ranking of Highly Cited Researchers was the rise of China, with 935 out of the list of 6,602 researchers, although America still dominates. Then there are the interesting outliers – such as Dr Arridina Susan Silitonga of Indonesia – who produce outstanding science outside of the support of massive research systems.
The Highly Cited Researchers’ list is produced by bibliometric experts and data scientists at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate Plc in London. The 2021 ‘who’s who’ lists influential researchers from 70 countries or regions, but 82.9% are from 10 leading research countries and 71.4% from the top five, “a remarkable concentration of top talent”.
The list identifies researchers who demonstrate significant influence in their fields by having published multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. This year 3,774 of the researchers have been recognised in in specific fields and 2,828 for cross-field impact.
The researchers are drawn from publications that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science™, and the list identifies the institutions and countries where they are based. The researchers work in 21 fields of the sciences and social sciences, and cross-fields.
China, with 935 highly cited researchers, nearly doubled the country’s share of Highly Cited Researchers in three years, from 7.9% in 2018 to 14.2% this year. It has the second highest number of highly cited researchers. Consequently, the share of top researchers from Europe and North America declined.
In first place, the United States is still way ahead of the pack with 2,622 researchers. However, its share is down – from 55% in 2014 to 43.3% in 2018 and 39.7% in 2021. “Of all papers indexed in the Web of Science for 2010 to 2020, the percentage with a US-based author was 24.7%,” said Clarivate in a statement released on 16 November.
The United Kingdom has the third highest numbers of much-cited researchers, with 492 of the world’s most cited scientists or 7.5% of the share, which has slipped down by 1.5% from 2018 to 2021.
In fourth position is Australia with 332 researchers, or 5%, which is up by 1%. It overtook Germany, which is now fifth with 331 researchers or 5%, down nearly 1%. The Netherlands is sixth, with 207 researchers or 3.1% of the total, with no change from before.
Canada is seventh with 196 researchers or 3%, which is marginally up. Eighth is France with 146 researchers or 2.2% (down 0.4%) followed by Spain with 109 researchers or 1.7% (down 0.2%), and in 10th place is Switzerland with 102 researchers or 1.5% (down 0.7%).
Australia and the Netherlands, which have populations of only 25 million and 17 million respectively, also performed well relative to population size – as did Hong Kong, which shot from 60 to 79 highly cited researchers in a year, largely thanks to the University of Hong Kong more than doubling its number from 14 to 33 in the past year.
A sharp decline (0.7%) for Switzerland in one year reflected a change in methodology, Clarivate said. Papers with more than 30 institutional addresses were cut from its analyses in past years, and this year it eliminated papers with more than 30 authors or group authorship. The change, “judged an improvement in reasonably crediting individual authors”, impacted upon Switzerland heavily, especially researchers at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
For the first time, researchers from Bangladesh, Kuwait, Mauritius, Morocco and the Republic of Georgia are on the list, Clarivate said.
With a population of 1.38 billion people, India had only 22 highly cited scientists, while Pakistan (221 million people) had five and Indonesia (273.5 million people) had one – an associate professor in mechanical engineering at Medan State Polytechnic, which is located in the University of Sumatera Utara in Medan in North Sumatra.
More information: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20211216151247674