Top 100 highly cited sustainability researchers

The announcement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provided a fresh direction to sustainability research that spans different disciplines. Consequently, scholarly databases made available the mapping of research publications to different SDGs, unleashing many opportunities for analysis. In this work, the top 100 Highly Cited Sustainability Researchers (HCSRs) and information related to them, such as the institutions they belong to, the type of these institutions, the geographical diversity of these researchers, and gender representation patterns, are analyzed. Also, from their publications, their publication pattern, including (i) the least and most researched SDGs, (ii) their Open Access publishing pattern, (iii) their collaboration pattern (iv) the pattern of their research impact, are analyzed. The most sought thematic areas of their research, top journals in which they publish, important research categories handled by these journals, etc., are also investigated. The most significant contribution of these researchers and their recent contributions are also discussed. The data indicates a significant disparity in research focus among the top 100 HCSRs, with most concentrating on "Good Health and Well Being," "Zero Hunger," and "Quality Education," while notably fewer researchers focus on "Decent Work and Economic Growth" and "No Poverty," underscoring the need for a more balanced research agenda across all SDGs. The study reveals that the United States, China, and the United Kingdom are the leading contributors to the top 100 HCSRs, suggesting that these countries are predominant in global sustainability research output, while nations like Iran and Saudi Arabia also make notable, albeit smaller, contributions. The institutional affiliations of HCSRs show a significant imbalance, with only 16 from private institutions compared to 84 from public ones. Specifically, it shows that out of the top 100 researchers, 93 are men, while only 7 are women. The analysis of authorship in publications by HCSRs reveals a tendency towards middle and last author positions, underscoring their collaborative and leadership roles within the research community. All these analyses can inform academia, industry, and policymakers about the most significant developments in research regarding SDGs.

Australia’s Pharmacology Research: A Scientometric Assessment of High-Cited Papers During 2002–2021

Objectives

To analyze Australia’s high-cited papers (HCPs) receiving ≥100 citations in pharmacology during 2002–2021 and examine the research characteristics, study performance of the top 30 leading participating organizations and authors, and identification of top 30 journals publishing in this area and sub-fields of their research.

Materials and Methods

Australia’s HCPs on pharmacology research from the top 30 most productive organizations were identified and extracted from the Scopus database from 2002 to 2021 on 21 September 2022 using a search strategy. Select bibliometric measures were utilized to evaluate the publication productivity of important players in this area. The network analysis was performed to evaluate the collaborative interactions amongst the countries, organizations, authors, and keywords.

Results

Of the 19,418 Australia’s publications (articles) in pharmacology from the top 30 most productive organizations during 2002–2022, only 685 (3.53%) were HCPs, which together received 1,14,623 citations, averaging 164.4 citations per paper (CPP) and the citations ranged from 100 to 1,230. Two papers had more than 1,000 citations and 16 papers had 500 citations. Of the 685 HCPs, 40.58% (278) and 11.39% (78) received external funding support and were international collaboratives. The most productive organizations were Monash University (n = 155), the University of Queensland (n = 111) and the University of Melbourne (n = 97). The most impactful organizations in terms of CPP and relative citation index (RCI) were James Cook University (203.22 and 1.21), Australian National University (196.67 and 1.18) and Queensland University of Technology (193.45 and 1.16). The most productive authors were J. Li (n = 24), C. J. H. Porter (n = 24) and R. L. Nation (n = 23) (Monash University, Melbourne); and the most impactful authors in terms of CPP were A. Christopoulos (Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Melbourne) (288.21), C.W. Pouton (Monash University, Melbourne) (241.50), and D.L. Peterson (University of Queensland, Brisbane) (225.58). The most productive journals were Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (n = 59), Environmental Pollution (n = 43) and Journal of Medicinal Chemistry (n = 42). The most impactful journals in terms of CPP were Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (371.8), Antiviral Research (286.86) and European Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences (253.0). The most important keywords with their frequency of appearances were Animal Experiments (108), Metabolism (76), Drug Effects (67), Animal Models (65), Protein Expression (64), Anti-Bacterial Agents (62), Drug Delivery Systems (54), Drug Formulation (44), Signal Transduction (42), and so on.

Conclusion

There is an urgent need to increase national funding and expand international collaboration in priority areas, which will help to increase and diversify research output and improve research impact.

Can we use link-based indicators to find highly cited publications? The case of the Trust Flow score

The Majestic’s Trust Flow (TF) is a link-based score aimed at measuring the influence of online objects (e.g. scientific publications) by considering the weighted number of links received from trusted websites. This study describes the bibliographic characteristics and impact of those publications with the highest TF score. In order to do this, 20,810 URL-based Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) were identified and analysed. The results show that these DOIs mainly represent recent publications (57.1% of publications were published between 2010 and 2020), journal articles (93.75%) published in the first SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) quartile (81.7%), written with international collaboration (40.4%) and biased towards the field of medicine (36.9%). While the TF score is a discovering tool with the potential to be used in webometric studies to find influential publications, a few technical limitations jeopardise the general applicability of this indicator for research evaluation at the publication level.

Antibiotic resistant bacteria: A bibliometric review of literature

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) are a serious threat to the health of people and the ecological environment. With this problem becoming more and more serious, more countries made research on the ARB, and the research number has been sharply increased particularly over the past decade. Therefore, it is quite necessary to globally retrace relevant researches on the ARB published from 2010 to 2020. This will help researchers to understand the current research situation, research trends and research hotspots in this field. This paper uses bibliometrics to examine publications in the field of ARB from 2010 to 2020 that were retrieved from the Web of Science (WOS). Our study performed a statistical analysis of the countries, institutions, journals, authors, research areas, author keywords, Essential Science Indicators (ESI) highly cited papers, and ESI hotspots papers to provide an overview of the ARB field as well as research trends, research hotspots, and future research directions in the field. The results showed that the number of related studies is increasing year by year; the USA is most published in the field of ARB; China is the most active in this field in the recent years; the Chinese Acad Sci published the most articles; Sci. Total Environ. published the greatest number of articles; CM Manaia has the most contributions; Environmental Sciences and Ecology is the most popular research area; and "antibiotic resistance," "antibiotics," and "antibiotic resistance genes" were the most frequently occurring author keywords. A citation analysis showed that aquatic environment-related antibiotic resistance is a key research area in this field, while antimicrobial nanomaterial-related research is a recent popular topic.

Research disciplinary interactions on scientific collaboration network in photocatalytic hydrogen evolution: Characteristics and dynamics

Interdisciplinary scientific collaboration promotes the innovative development of scientific research. Photocatalytic hydrogen evolution (PHE) is a typical interdisciplinary subject. This study aims to explore the characteristics of discipline interaction and the temporal evolution in the field. Bibliometric analysis could be used to understand the stage of research in a particular subject. In this work, the publications on the topic in Web of Science (WoS) platform from 1999 to 2020 were selected. On the basis of social network theory, the characteristics of interdisciplinary were revealed from three perspectives. First, the disciplinary interaction network is constructed through disciplinary co-occurrence to detect the characteristics of interaction structure among different disciplines. Then the node centrality index is employed to explore the influence of disciplines in the interactive network by using network centrality analysis. Moreover, the dynamic of discipline interaction evolution is studied using blockmodeling analysis. In the field of PHE, the number of disciplines and the intensity of interaction among different subjects gradually increased in the past 20 years. Chemistry and Material Sciences are the core discipline, and they play an important role in the network. The whole network is divided into different discipline groups. The scale of the discipline group is becoming large, and the disciplinary interaction is becoming more complex. The obtained results are helpful for guiding scholars to carry out interdisciplinary interaction. The methods of detecting interdisciplinary interactive relationship could provide paths for interdisciplinary research in other fields.

Trends and hot topics in radiology, nuclear medicine and medical imaging from 2011-2021: a bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers

Purpose

To spotlight the trends and hot topics looming from the highly cited papers in the subject category of Radiology, Nuclear Medicine & Medical Imaging with bibliometric analysis.

Materials and methods

Based on the Essential Science Indicators, this study employed a bibliometric method to examine the highly cited papers in the subject category of Radiology, Nuclear Medicine & Medical Imaging in Web of Science (WoS) Categories, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In total, 1325 highly cited papers were retrieved and assessed spanning from the years of 2011 to 2021. In particular, the bibliometric information of the highly cited papers based on WoS database such as the main publication venues, the most productive countries, and the top cited publications was presented. An Abstract corpus was built to help identify the most frequently explored topics. VoSviewer was used to visualize the co-occurrence networks of author keywords.

Results

The top three active journals are Neuroimage, Radiology and IEEE T Med Imaging. The United States, Germany and England have the most influential publications. The top cited publications unrelated to COVID-19 can be grouped in three categories: recommendations or guidelines, processing software, and analysis methods. The top cited publications on COVID-19 are dominantly in China. The most frequently explored topics based on the Abstract corpus and the author keywords with the great link strengths overlap to a great extent. Specifically, phrases such as magnetic resonance imaging, deep learning, prostate cancer, chest CT, computed tomography, CT images, coronavirus disease, convolutional neural network(s) are among the most frequently mentioned.

Conclusion

The bibliometric analysis of the highly cited papers provided the most updated trends and hot topics which may provide insights and research directions for medical researchers and healthcare practitioners in the future.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11604-022-01268-z.

Investigación española en las áreas de adicciones y de trastornos de la alimentación: análisis de la producción, colaboración e impacto científico (1962-2017)

Las adicciones y los trastornos de la alimentación constituyen uno de los principales problemas de salud en la sociedad contemporánea al que se destinan gran cantidad de recursos destinados a la investigación para su prevención y tratamiento. Objetivos. Analizar la investigación española en el área de adicciones y trastornos de la alimentación desde que se publicó el primer trabajo recogido en bases de datos bibliográficas y desde una perspectiva bibliométrica. Metodología. Para obtener la información necesaria se consultaron las bases de datos Web of Science, Scopus y bases de datos del CSIC. Se elaboró un perfil de búsqueda específico. Se obtuvieron indicadores bibliométricos de producción, colaboración e impacto científico. Se utilizó el análisis de redes sociales para identificar las redes de investigadores y sus relaciones de colaboración, así como la red de co-palabras clave. Resultados. La producción científica aumentó progresivamente durante los casi 50 años analizados. Los trabajos se publicaron en una gran variedad de revistas nacionales y extranjeras, entre las que destacaron Adicciones, Revista Española de Drogodependencias, Trastornos Adictivos y Salud y Drogas. Conclusiones. La producción, colaboración e impacto de la investigación ha sido creciente y las adicciones más estudiadas fueron el tabaquismo, alcoholismo, consumo de cocaína y consumo de anfetaminas.

The most 100 cited papers in addiction research on cannabis, heroin, cocaine and psychostimulants. A bibliometric cross-sectional analysis

The number of citations a peer-reviewed article receives is often used as a measure of its importance and scientific impact. This paper identifies, describes and categorizes the highly cited papers in addiction research on cannabis, heroin, cocaine and psychostimulants. Highly cited papers were identified in the Web of Science Core Collection database. Several bibliometric indicators were calculated. Social network analysis was applied to draw groups of authors and institutions with the greatest number of collaborations and co-words. The number of citations for the top 100 cited articles ranged from 649 to 4,672. The articles were published in 40 journals. The subject category Substance Abuse included 10 papers. The United States was the most productive country (79 papers), followed by the United Kingdom (9). The main funding institutions were the National Institutes of Health in the United States. The network of collaboration between authors distributes the 352 researchers into 53 groups. The three most cited works address the neural basis of drug craving as an incentive-sensitization theory of addiction, the clinical and research uses of the Addiction Severity Index, and the neurocircuitry of addiction. Scientific literature on addictions is widely dispersed both in multidisciplinary and specific journals of neurology, psychiatry and addictions, with relatively few publications providing most of the citations. An ongoing challenge for this field is the concentration of highly cited papers coming from a select number of countries, with the United States being the research hub of the world, with the highest volume of publications and total citations.

Lone Geniuses or One among Many? An Explorative Study of Contemporary Highly Cited Researchers

Purpose

The ranking lists of highly cited researchers receive much public attention. In common interpretations, highly cited researchers are perceived to have made extraordinary contributions to science. Thus, the metrics of highly cited researchers are often linked to notions of breakthroughs, scientific excellence, and lone geniuses.

Design/methodology/approach

In this study, we analyze a sample of individuals who appear on Clarivate Analytics’ Highly Cited Researchers list. The main purpose is to juxtapose the characteristics of their research performance against the claim that the list captures a small fraction of the researcher population that contributes disproportionately to extending the frontier and gaining—on behalf of society—knowledge and innovations that make the world healthier, richer, sustainable, and more secure.

Findings

The study reveals that the highly cited articles of the selected individuals generally have a very large number of authors. Thus, these papers seldom represent individual contributions but rather are the result of large collective research efforts conducted in research consortia. This challenges the common perception of highly cited researchers as individual geniuses who can be singled out for their extraordinary contributions. Moreover, the study indicates that a few of the individuals have not even contributed to highly cited original research but rather to reviews or clinical guidelines. Finally, the large number of authors of the papers implies that the ranking list is very sensitive to the specific method used for allocating papers and citations to individuals. In the “whole count” methodology applied by Clarivate Analytics, each author gets full credit of the papers regardless of the number of additional co-authors. The study shows that the ranking list would look very different using an alternative fractionalised methodology.

Research limitations

The study is based on a limited part of the total population of highly cited researchers.

Practical implications

It is concluded that “excellence” understood as highly cited encompasses very different types of research and researchers of which many do not fit with dominant preconceptions.

Originality/value

The study develops further knowledge on highly cited researchers, addressing questions such as who becomes highly cited and the type of research that benefits by defining excellence in terms of citation scores and specific counting methods.

Interpreting Bibliometric Data

Many academic analyses of good practice in the use of bibliometric data address only technical aspects and fail to account for and appreciate user requirements, expectations, and actual practice. Bibliometric indicators are rarely the only evidence put before any user group. In the present state of knowledge, it is more important to consider how quantitative evaluation can be made simple, transparent, and readily understood than it is to focus unduly on precision, accuracy, or scholarly notions of purity. We discuss how the interpretation of 'performance' from a presentation using accurate but summary bibliometrics can change when iterative deconstruction and visualization of the same dataset is applied. From the perspective of a research manager with limited resources, investment decisions can easily go awry at governmental, funding program, and institutional levels. By exploring select real-life data samples we also show how the specific composition of each dataset can influence interpretive outcomes.

An evaluation of percentile measures of citation impact, and a proposal for making them better

Percentiles are statistics pointing to the standing of a paper’s citation impact relative to other papers in a given citation distribution. Percentile Ranks (PRs) often play an important role in evaluating the impact of researchers, institutions, and similar lines of study. Because PRs are so important for the assessment of scholarly impact, and because citations differ greatly across time and fields, various percentile approaches have been proposed to time- and field-normalize citations. Unfortunately, current popular methods often face significant problems in time- and field-normalization, including when papers are assigned to multiple fields or have been published by more than one unit (e.g., researchers or countries). They also face problems for estimating citation counts for pre-defined PRs (e.g., the 90th PR). We offer a series of guidelines and procedures that, we argue, address these problems and others and provide a superior means to make the use of percentile methods more accurate and informative. In particular, we introduce two approaches, CP-IN and CP-EX, that should be preferred in bibliometric studies because they consider the complete citation distribution and can be accurately interpreted. Both approaches are based on cumulative frequencies in percentages (CPs). The paper further shows how bar graphs and beamplots can present PRs in a more meaningful and accurate manner.

Which are the influential publications in the Web of Science subject categories over a long period of time? CRExplorer software used for big-data analyses in bibliometrics

What are the landmark papers in scientific disciplines? Which papers are indispensable for scientific progress? These are typical questions which are of interest not only for researchers (who frequently know the answers – or guess to know them) but also for the interested general public. Citation counts can be used to identify very useful papers since they reflect the wisdom of the crowd – in this case, the scientists using published results for their research. In this study, we identified with recently developed methods for the program CRExplorer landmark publications in nearly all Web of Science subject categories (WoS-SCs). These are publications which belong more frequently than other publications during the citing years to the top-1‰ in their subject area. As examples, we show the results of five subject categories: ‘Information Science & Library Science’, ‘Computer Science, Information Systems’, ‘Computer Science, Software Engineering’, ‘Psychology, Social’ and, ‘Chemistry, Physical’. The results of the other WoS-SCs can be found online at http://crexplorer.net . An analyst of the results should keep in mind that the identification of landmark papers depends on the used methods and data. Small differences in methods and/or data may lead to other results.

Early career performance and its correlation with gender and publication output during doctoral education

Publishing in peer-reviewed journals as a part of the doctoral education is common practice in many countries. The publication output of doctoral students is increasingly used in selection processes for funding and employment in their early careers. Against the backdrop of this development, the aim of this study is to examine (1) how performance during the doctoral education affect the probability of attaining research excellence in the early career; and (2) if there is performance differences between males and females in the early career and to which degree these gender differences can be explained by performance differences during the doctoral education. The data consist of Swedish doctoral students employed at the faculty of science and technology and the faculty of medicine at a Swedish university. Our main conclusions are that (1) research performance during the doctoral education has a positive effect on attaining excellence in the early career; (2) there is an interaction between publication volume and excellence during doctoral education suggesting that a combination of quantity and quality in doctoral students’ performance is indicative of future excellence; (3) there are performance differences in the early career indicating that males have a higher probability of attaining excellence than females, and; (4) this difference is partly explained by performance differences during the doctoral education.

Trends in scientific research in Insights into Imaging: a bibliometric review

OBJECTIVES

To analyse the coverage and main bibliometric indicators of Insights into Imaging in Scopus and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) from the Web of Science Core Collection database.

METHODS

The evolution of journal production in the Scopus database was analysed according to document types, collaboration indexes between authors and institutions, and citation indicators (number of citations, SCImago Journal Rank, quartile, h-index, and most cited works). Networks of collaboration among authors, institutions, and countries were also analysed, as well as those of co-word networks. As a complementary source of information, the Emerging Source Citation Index from the Web of Science database was also considered.

RESULTS

Four hundred seventy-four papers were included in Scopus and 292 in ESCI. The index of collaboration was 5.18 for authors and 2.74 for institutions. International collaboration occurred in 24.7% of the papers. The number of citations received in Scopus (4295) exceeds the number of citations received in ESCI (1177). The average number of citations per paper was 9.06 in Scopus versus 4.03 in ESCI. The h-index was 29 in Scopus and 16 in ESCI. Several collaborative groups were identified at the national and international level.

CONCLUSIONS

There is a progression of Insights into Imaging in the ranking of journals in the area that, if maintained, will allow it to remain in the first quartile in the Scopus database. The main topics of interest were technologies such as 'Magnetic resonance imaging', 'Computed tomography', 'Radiology', and 'Ultrasonography' and diseases such as 'Breast cancer' and those related to 'Paediatrics'.

Bibliometric analysis of multi-language veterinary journals

Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between language and total number of citations found among documents in journals written in English and other languages. We selected all the journals clustered together in the Journal Citation Reports 2014 under the subject category “Veterinary Sciences” and downloaded all the data registered between 1994-2013 by Web of Science for the journals that stated publishing documents in languages other than English. We classified each of these journals by quartile and extracted information regarding their impact factor, language(s) stated, country of origin, total number of documents published, total number of reviews published, percentage of documents published in English and the quartile in which each journal ranked. Of the 48,118 documents published by the 28 journals analyzed, 55.8% were published in English. Interestingly, although most of the journals state being multi-language, most documents published in quartile 1 journals were in English (an average of 99.2%), while the percentage was 93.1% in quartile 2 journals, 62.1% in quartile 3 journals and 27.4% in quartile 4 journals. We also confirmed that citation distribution in these journals was highly skewed. The results of this study suggest that journals should consider adopting English as the main language as this will increase citation counts and the impact factor of the journal.

Is the promotion of research reflected in bibliometric data? A network analysis of highly cited papers on the Clusters of Excellence supported under the Excellence Initiative in Germany

Under the Excellence Initiative, a number of Clusters of Excellence in Germany have been supported since 2006 and 2007—including each a limited number of cooperating institutions. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether support for Clusters of Excellence since 2006 and 2007 is reflected in bibliometric network data. For this purpose, a comparison is made between network data in the period before support started (2003–2005) and in the period after support started (2009–2011). For these two periods, a co-authorship network is generated (based on the funded institutions). This is based on publications which are among the 1 % most frequently cited publications in their respective fields and publication year and which have at least one author from Germany. As the results show, the outcomes this yields for life sciences and natural sciences differ from each other. Whereas natural sciences display an effect of establishment of Clusters of Excellence on the bibliometric networks, this was not true of life sciences. After establishment of the Clusters of Excellence, the network in natural sciences not only contained more institutions of a Cluster of Excellence, but these institutions were distributed across fewer bibliometric clusters in the network than before establishment. In other words the structure of the Clusters of Excellence was better reflected in the network.

Citations in introduction and literature review sections should not count for quality

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to suggest that citations made in the introduction and literature review sections of academic writings should not count in the analysis of citations to measure the quality of research papers.

Design/methodology/approach

– Elucidatory expositions are made on the purposes of the introduction and literature review sections.

Findings

– The nature of citations to knowledge to establish these purposes is identified and used to suggest that citations made in these sections should not count in citation analysis that are used to determine quality of publications. Introduction sections are written to identify the importance and justification for the subject of study, while literature reviews are written to identify gaps, opposing views, strengths and weaknesses in the status quo knowledge.

Originality/value

– This paper will provide insight and awareness to new methodologies to cull and curate appropriate citation count in the computation of quality of publications.