Top World Researchers in WoS

Clarivate Analytics, a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, unveiled its list of Highly Cited Researchers 2020 today. The highly anticipated annual list identifies researchers who demonstrated significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. Their 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.

Methodology

More than 6,000 researchers, in 21 fields of the sciences and social sciences, and cross field categories were selected based on the number of highly cited papers they produced over an 11-year period from January 2009 to December 2019. 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™ and 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™, the world's largest publisher-neutral citation index and research intelligence platform.

The United States with 2650 (41.5%), China with 770 (12.1%), the United Kingdom with 514 (8%), Germany with 345 (5.4%), Australia with 305 (4.8%), Canada with 195 ( 3.1%), the Netherlands with 181 (2.8%), France with 160 (2.5%), Switzerland with 154 (2.4%) and Spain with 103 researchers (1.6%) have the highest number of highly cited researchers in the world. Accordingly, 84.2% of the world's top researchers belong to the above 10 countries.

It should be noted that the growth rate of China's top researchers is significantly increasing, where in 2018 with 482 (7.9%), in 2019 with 636 (10.2%) and in 2020 with 770 researchers (12.1%) are in top list. Meanwhile, the share of top researchers in the United States in 2020 has decreased by about 2.5% and the United Kingdom by 0.3% compared to the previous year. Given that the share of the other top 10 countries in the world of researchers in the world has been almost constant in 2020, it seems that China's share has increased from the decline of the United States and the United Kingdom. The list also includes 26 Nobel Prize winners, three of whom are from this year's Nobel Prize winners.

Harvard University with 188 researchers, the Chinese Academy of Sciences with 124 researchers and Stanford with 106 researchers are the three organizations with the highest number of top researchers in the world.