46 researchers from Austria are among the most cited scientists – Austria

Data company Clarivate published this year’s list of highly cited researchers. Accordingly, 6,938 people from more than 69 countries make up the top percentage of the most cited scientists. In the new “Who’s Who” of the world’s most influential researchers, there are 46 researchers working at least partly in Austria, compared to 43 the year before.

The Clarivate Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) used scientific papers published and cited between 2011 and 2021 for analysis. “Highly-cited researchers” are those researchers who ranked in the top 100 percentiles of their scientific field in the year of the survey, and thus made a significant impact in their field. The measure of the scientific significance of a researcher’s work is not only the number of publications in specialized journals, but above all the number of times it has been cited by other colleagues.

Although the country’s share has declined, most of the most influential scientists still work in the United States: 2,764 American researchers make up 38.3 percent of all people on the list, up from 43.3 percent in 2018. China is on the rise, with 1,169 researchers in List, its share has doubled to 16.2 percent since 2018.

It is followed by Great Britain (579 “highly cited researchers”), Germany (369), Australia (337), Canada (226), the Netherlands (210), France (134), Switzerland (112) and Singapore (106). Austria’s share of the scientific elite remained unchanged from the previous year at 0.7 percent.

Harvard is once again the institution with the highest concentration of the world’s most cited researchers, with 233 names on the list working there. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (228) comes second, followed by the National Institutes of Health (113) in the United States and the Max Planck Society (67) in Germany.

Of the 46 researchers working in Austria, only two are women, biotechnologist Angela Cicic of the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) and microbiologist Cornelia Las-Florel of the Medical University of Innsbruck. Two researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg near Vienna managed to belong to the “highly-cited researchers” in several categories: Kiwan Riahi is one of only 28 scientists on the list, and they are among the world’s three most-cited researchers. Significantly – in the case of Riahi, these are the earth sciences (“earth sciences”), the environment, ecology and the social sciences. Yoshihide Wada is named in Environment, Ecology, and Earth Sciences.

25 scientists from Austria can be found in the “multiple fields” category. Through their interdisciplinary work, they have a strong influence in many scientific fields, according to Clarivate. There were five entries from Austria in the field of earth sciences, four each in the categories of physics, social sciences and clinical medicine. There are three researchers working in Austria in the fields of ecology and ecology as well as neurosciences, one scientist in the field of microbiology (due to multiple entries, the total is higher than the number of researchers working in Austria represented on the list, note.).

The arrangement by institutions is not clear, as researchers can work in several institutions. According to the mapping by Clarivate, the University of Vienna, with nine names, comes first in the list, ahead of IIASA with eight names. The Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) counted its staff at OeAW institutes and members and 16 names appeared on the list — including Josef Penninger of the University of British Columbia (Canada) and the OeAW’s Institute for Molecular Biotechnology, who are not managed by Clarivate under Austria.