Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators

Researchers from Stanford University led by renowned Prof John Ioannidis recently published an updated version of their 2017 study about scientific citations. The study ranks the “career-long” citation impact of about 160,000 scientists in all disciplines, sorted by field. ICREA Professors at ICFO Javier García de Abajo, Maciej Lewenstein, Antonio Acín and Niek van Hulst, as well as ICFO’s director, Prof Lluis Torner are ranked among the top 0.5% in the world, in their subfield. Many other GLs are ranked very high, even junior ones (quite remarkably, as the study uses career-long data).

This study uses data from Scopus with data freeze as of May 6, 2020, assessing scientists’ impact up until the end of 2019. It measures career-long impact and is based on a sophisticated model that uses several assumptions and indicators. Data is provided with and without so-called self-citations, which in this analysis is taken to the extreme as the latter include even citations by any author of a given paper (i.e., not necessarily by the considered author).

Rather than replacing Clarivate’s Highly-Cited Scientists annual compilation measuring annual citation impact, this study may be seen as a complementary tool for assessing research impact.