Few topics these days are as pervasive and pressing as the discussion about
energy: how it immediately affects matters both economic and political, and
how the search for new and alternative technologies must be a priority.
Accordingly, Science
Watch® turns its attention to energy as a focus of
scientific research.
To identify highly cited energy research of recent years, Science
Watch turned to the "Energy & Fuels" category in which
journals are covered in the
Science Citation Index, part of the
Clarivate
Web of Knowledge. This population of 94 specialty journals
produced roughly 100,000 papers indexed by Clarivate between 1998
and 2008. From that body of research, Science Watch identified
the most-cited institutions, authors, and journals.
Most-Cited
Journals
in Energy & Fuels,
1998-2008
(Ranked by citations
to papers
published and cited between
1998 and 2008)
The two tables below present institutions ranked according to two
separate measures: the first table (1a), by
total citations to Energy & Fuels papers published and cited during
the 1998 to 2008 period; and, the second table
(1b), by impact, or citations per paper, among those institutions that
published at least 100 papers in the category during the 11-year span.
Highly cited authors and journals are featured in the
bottom table (2).
Among institutions ranked by total citations, none surpasses Sandia
National Laboratories, with more than 4,100 citations to its 395
papers, although another U.S. Department of Energy installation, the
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), of Golden, Colorado, is
not far behind. Along with these and other U.S. national facilities,
the total-citations ranking features comparable government institutions
representing other nations, including Spain's Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC), France's Centre National de le
Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and Japan's National Institute of
Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), along with the
national science academies of China and Russia.
Nevertheless, in the midst of these large national institutions, a
number of universities also make strong showings in the total-citations
column, notably Pennsylvania State University, Imperial College London,
and Princeton University.
Princeton, in fact, winds up atop the impact ranking, with an average
of 13 citations to its 210 papers indexed in the Energy & Fuels
category since 1998. Helping to anchor Princeton's standout performance
are two featured names in the author table: the late Supramaniam
Srinivasan, who contributed to highly cited surveys of
fuel-cell research;
and C.K. Law, who has published prolifically on aspects of combustion.
Just behind Princeton, a solid impact score is also posted by the
Jülich Research Centre (Forschungszentrum Jülich), a German
national laboratory, thanks to its highly cited papers on
photovoltaics, methanol fuel cells, and other topics.
Among authors, Ayhan Demirbas of Karadeniz Technical University in
Trabzon, Turkey, collected nearly 1,900 citations on an output that
exceeded 200 papers. (Of course, a prolific output by itself is no
guarantee of high citations; besides Demirbas, eight other authors
fielded more than 200 papers in this survey, but none of these names
garnered more than 15 total citations.) Papers to which Demirbas
contributed primarily discuss
biofuels, along
with broader aspects of energy policy in Turkey.
In the above table to the right, the
Journal of Power Sources distinguishes itself with more than
71,000 collective citations to 7,705 papers indexed by Clarivate
since 1998—a total more than twice that of the next journal in
the ranking.
Overall, the most-cited paper in this survey, from 1999, reports the
achievement of 18.8% conversion efficiency in a thin-film
solar cell (M.A.
Contreras, et al., Prog. Photovoltaics, 7: 311-6,
1999). The paper's current citation total of 465 considerably boosted
the tallies of four authors featured here (all affiliated with the NREL
at the time): Miguel Contreras, Rommel Noufi, Kannan Ramanathan, and
Falah Hasoon.
Christopher King is the Editor of the Science
Watch® Newsletter, Clarivate.
Christopher King is the Editor of the Science
Watch® Newsletter, Clarivate.
Keywords: Energy, energy research, energy and fuels,
solar cells, fuel cells, combustion, Sandia National Laboratories,
National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Ayhan Demirbas.