The United States continues to house the most highly cited researchers in the world, an earned distinction owed partly to Harvard University, according to Clarivate Plc’s annual list.
Thirty-eight percent of the nearly 7,000 Highly Cited Researchers of 2022 hail from the United States—a number that is more than double second-place Mainland China at 16%.
This year, Clarivate’s annual list identified 6,938 researchers 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.
The 6,938 researchers represent 69 countries and regions. Some extraordinary researchers were recognized across multiple fields: 219 named in two fields, 28 named in three fields and 4 named in four fields. Overall, there were 3,981 awards in specific fields and 3,244 awards for cross-field impact, totaling 7,225 awards across all of the individual researchers.
Retracted papers and research misconduct
The numbers may be a little higher this year than last, but overall, Clarivate’s analysis has remained steady over the past five years or so. Something that is new this year is Clarivate’s partnership with Retraction Watch to address increasing concerns over potential misconduct, such as plagiarism, image manipulation, fake peer review.
To create the annual list, Clarivate’s team first compiles a list of preliminary candidates based on a quantitative analysis of a decade’s worth of citation records in the Web of Science Core Collection. All Highly Cited Researcher records are then reviewed in a second phase of deep qualitative analysis. But this year, the partnership with Retraction Watch allowed Clarivate to expand that qualitative analysis.
“Our analysts searched for evidence of misconduct in publications of candidates on our preliminary list,” wrote David Pendlebury, Head of Research Analysis at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate, in a recent blog. “This extended analysis proved invaluable in identifying researchers to exclude, so this exercise will continue in future years.”
Additionally, for the past several years, Clarivate has excluded highly cited papers that have been retracted from their analysis. Since 2019, the data company has also excluded authors whose collection of highly cited papers revealed unusually high levels of self-citation. This year, in addition to the partnership with Retraction Watch, Clarivate implemented more exclusion filters. This resulted in a significant increase in the number of putative Highly Cited Researchers excluded from the final list—from about 300 in 2021 to about 550 this year.
“It is concerning to anticipate that in a few years perhaps up to 10% of those we are identifying through our algorithms may be engaged in publication and citation gaming or misconduct,” wrote Pendlebury. “This then is an explicit call for the research community to police itself through more thorough peer review and other internationally recognized procedures to ensure integrity in research and its publication.
2022 list
Although the nearly 7,000 Highly Cited Researchers of 2022 work in 69 countries/regions, 83% of them are from just 10 countries while 71% are from the first five on the list.
As typical, the U.S. topped the list with 2,764 Highly Cited Researchers, or about 38.3%. However, that number is down from 39.7% in 2021, 41.5% in 2020, 44% in 2019 and 43.3% in 2018.
In the 2022 ranking of institutions, 14 of the top 20 are in the U.S. Harvard University is first, as it has been in years past, with 233 Highly Cited Researchers. Stanford University (126 researchers) is third, the NIH is fourth (113) and MIT is sixth (71).
The following U.S. universities round out the top 20:
8. University of California San Diego- 66 researchers
10. University of Pennsylvania- 62
11. University of California Berkeley-61
12. Johns Hopkins University- 56
13. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center- 52
14. Columbia University- 51
16. Yale University- 49
17. Washington University- 48
19. Cornell University- 46
19. University of California San Francisco-46
19. University of Washington Seattle- 46
In contrast to the U.S., Mainland China has seen an increase in its share of Highly Cited Researchers since 2018. This year, Mainland China is second, as it has been for several years, with 1,169 Highly Cited Researchers, or 16.2%, up from 14.2% in 2021, 12.1% in 2020, 10.2% in 2019 and 7.9% in 2018.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences is second on the institutional list with 228 researchers—just 5 less than Harvard. Interestingly, Tsinghua University is ranked No. 5 with 73 researchers, and then China doesn’t appear on the institutional list again until Hunan University at No. 33 with 32 researchers.
In fact, the list of top 50 institutions is dominated by the U.S. and UK. Despite having a population 1/5 the size of the U.S. and 1/20 the size of Mainland China, the UK is third on the countries list with 579 researchers, or 8%.
According to the data, Australia is gaining share, moving from 4% in 2018 to a 4.7% share this year. The newcomer to the top 10 is Singapore, which increased its number of Highly Cited Researchers to 106—up from 90 last year. Spain dropped out of the top 10 in 2022.
While there were some movers and shakers this year, the overriding theme is still the same as it has been for the past few years now.
“The headline story, as it has been lately, is one of sizeable gains for Mainland China and continuing incremental loss of share for the United States, which reflects a transformational rebalancing of scientific and scholarly contributions at the top level through the globalization of the research enterprise,” Clarivate wrote in its overall analysis.