The Most-Cited Institutions Overall,
1999-2009
Featured Institution Interview
This month, ScienceWatch.com presents a
listing of the top 20 institutions which, as of the
second bimonthly update of
Essential Science IndicatorsSM(January 1, 1999-April 30, 2009) attracted the
highest total citations to their papers published
inThomson
Reuters-indexed journals over all 22
fields in the database. These institutions are the top
20 out of a pool of 4,050 institutions comprising the
top 1% ranked by total citation count over all
fields.
The top 20 institutions over all fields consist of 14 US-based
universities, three UK-based universities, and one each in Canada, Japan,
and Germany. These institutions all produce a high volume of papers
resulting in extremely high citation counts—the top six institutions
have over one million citations to their credit, and cite counts for the
remaining 14 are all well over a half-million.
Leading the way, as it does for nine of the 22 fields, is Harvard
University, with 95,291 papers cited a total of 2,597,786 times up until
the end of April 2009. Harvard's citation strengths lie in biological and
health sciences: the top five fields in their the citation record are
Clinical Medicine, Molecular Biology & Genetics, Biology &
Biochemistry, Neuroscience & Behavior, and Immunology. Harvard ranked
at #1 in the Special Topics analysis on
Underage/College
Drinking, and the #1 researcher in this topic,
Henry
Weschler, is affiliated with Harvard. Pioneering Alzheimer's researcher
Dennis Selkoe
[see
also ¦
see
also] hails from this institution and has spoken with ScienceWatch.com
on numerous occasions about his research. Other top scorers for Harvard
include
Stanley Korsmeyer,
Martha Shenton [
see also ¦
see
also],
Ronald
Kessler [
see
also ¦
see
also], and top diabetes researchers
David
Nathan and
JoAnn
Manson. Harvard also ranks highly in the physical sciences; the
institution is in the top 20 in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Economics
& Business, Geosciences, Environment/Ecology, Mathematics, and Computer
Science as well.
The Max Planck Society ranks at #2 overall, with 69,373 papers cited
1,366,087 times. This institution, with its many component facilities, is a
heavy hitter in the physical sciences, with the fields of Physics,
Chemistry, and Space Science among its top-cited fields. In fact, the Max
Planck Society is the top-ranking institution overall in Physics and Space
Science, and ranks at #2 overall in Chemistry.
Ferenc
Krausz and
Manfred
Reetz have both spoken with ScienceWatch.com about their
highly cited work. Molecular Biology & Genetics and Biology &
Biochemistry round out the top five fields for the organization, which
ranks at #2 overall in both fields.
Coming in at #4 is the
University
of Washington, with 54,198 papers cited a total of 1,147,283 times.
ScienceWatch.com featured Washington's Department of Earth and
Space Sciences, and
Minze
Stuiver, one of the 20 most-cited scientists in Geosciences and lead
author of the most-cited paper in Geosciences, "INTCAL98 radiocarbon age
calibration, 24,000-0 cal BP" (Stuiver M, et al., Radiocarbon
40[3]: 1041-83, 1998).
G. Alan
Marlatt, one of the top 20 researchers in the Special Topic of
Underage/College Drinking, is also affiliated with the University of
Washington.
The first of five California universities on the list, Stanford University,
ranks at #5 with 48,846 papers with a total of 1,138,795 cites. The #2
ranked researcher in the field of Mathematics,
Robert
Tibshirani, hails from Stanford, and is a pioneer in microarray
research.
David
Donoho
[see
also], another high-ranking Mathematics researcher, has also been
featured in ScienceWatch.com. Stanford was also among the top five
institutions
in the Special Topic on High
Temperature Superconductors.
The second Californian university ranks at #6: the University of
California, Los Angeles, with 55,237 papers cited 1,077,069 times. One of
the 20 most-cited researchers in Space Science and the #1 researcher in our
Special Topic on Cosmic
Microwave Background Radiation,
Edward
Wright,
[see
also], is from UCLA's Division of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
The remaining California institutions are the University of California,
Berkeley at #8 (46,984 papers cited 945,817 times), the University of
California, San Francisco at #9 (36,106 papers cited 939,302 times) and the
University of California, San Diego at #12 (40,789 papers cited 899,832
times).
Sandwiched between all these California institutions is the University of
Michigan at #7, with 54,612 papers cited a total of 948,621 times. By far
the largest contribution to this cite count comes from Michigan's work in
Clinical Medicine—their record in this field includes 16,314 papers
with 324,701 total citations.
Rounding out the top 10 is the University of Pennsylvania, with 46,235
papers cited a total of 931,399 times. Penn is in the top 1% for
institutions in 20 of the database's 22 fields. Distinguished Penn
researchers who have been featured in ScienceWatch.com include
Mitchell Lazer,
Mirjam
Cvetic,
Mauro
Guillen, and
Wafik
El-Deiry.
The remaining institutions on the list include the sole entries from Japan
(the University of Tokyo at #11) and Canada (the University of Toronto at
#13) and the three UK-based institutions (UCL at #14, the University of
Cambridge at #18, and the University of Oxford at #19). Four US
institutions make up the rest of the list: Columbia University at #15, Yale
University at #16, MIT at #17, and the University of Wisconsin at #20.
The Most-Cited Institutions
Overall, 1999-2009's current most-cited paper in
Essential Science
Indicators, with
3,210 cites:
Golub TR, et al., "Molecular classification of
cancer: Class discovery and class prediction by gene
expression monitoring," Science 286(5439): 531-7,
15 October 1999. Source:
Essential Science Indicators from
Thomson
Reuters.