Mainland China has nearly doubled its share of “highly cited researchers” in the past four years and although 2021 was no exception, the United States remains the scientific powerhouse of the world—for now—according to Clarivate Plc’s annual list of the year’s most highly cited researchers.
Released Tuesday, the annual list identifies 6,600 researchers from across the globe who demonstrated significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. The Highly Cited Researchers’ names are drawn from the publications that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science citation index, and the list identifies the research institutions and countries where they are based.
This year, U.S. organizations represent six of the top 10 highly cited institutions, with Harvard University sitting at the top of the leaderboard with 214 highly cited researchers. Stanford University, NIH, MIT, University of California Berkeley and University of California San Diego round out the list. UC San Diego notched an additional special recognition as the home institution of Rob Knight, the only researcher on the entire list to be recognized for being highly cited in four or more fields. Knight, the founding director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation and professor of Pediatrics and Computer Science & Engineering at UC San Diego, is a highly cited researcher in biology and biochemistry, environment/ecology, microbiology, and molecular biology and genetics.
Country of Origin
The United States is home to 2,622 of this year’s Highly Cited Researchers, which amounts to 39.7% of the overall list. Compared with 2018, this is a decrease of 3.6%. Meanwhile, in that time, Mainland China has seen an increase of 6.3%—from 7.9% in 2018 to 14.2% in 2021—nearly doubling their share of Highly Cited Researchers.
“The headline story is one of sizeable gains for Mainland China and a decline for the United States, particularly when you look at the trends over the last four years, which reflect a transformational rebalancing of scientific and scholarly contributions at the top level through the globalization of the research enterprise,” said David Pendlebury, Senior Citation Analyst at the Institute for Scientific Information.
The UK came in third on the list with 492 Highly Cited Researchers, which is an impressive number given that the country has a population 1/5 the size of the United States and 1/20 the size of Mainland China.
“This year’s data reflect a decade’s worth of research publications from the global scientific community,” said Joel Haspel, SVP Strategy, Science at Clarivate. “As well as documenting the ‘Eureka!’ moments, our data tell the story of late nights spent filling in grant applications, poring over results in the lab, the unsung work of peer reviewing contemporaries’ manuscripts, and the many small failures that ultimately lead to bigger successes and accelerating innovation.”For the first time, researchers from Bangladesh, Kuwait, Mauritius, Morocco and the Republic of Georgia are included on the 2021 list.
Methodology
The full list of Highly Cited Researchers comprises 6,602 researchers from more than 70 countries. Of the world's population of scientists and social scientists, Highly Cited Researchers are therefore 1 in 1,000. You can see the full list, along with discipline field, institution affiliation(s), and researcher profile, here.
According to Clarivate, the researchers were selected based on the number of highly cited papers they produced over an 11-year period from January 2010 to December 2020. The methodology that determines the “who’s who of researchers” draws on data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate. It uses InCites Benchmarking & Analytics, Essential Science Indicators and a unique compilation of science performance metrics and trend data based on scholarly paper publication counts and citation data from the Web of Science. (You can read more about the methodology here.)