The 6,602 most “influential” researchers in the world identified

A total of 6,602 researchers from seventy countries have been identified and included in the world list that compiles the most cited and influential scientists in the world in their field, which places the United States at the forefront of that classification and Spain in ninth place.

The list has been compiled by the company Clarivate Analytics, specialized in the analysis of scientific and academic data, and identifies researchers from around the world who have demonstrated a very significant influence in their fields of expertise through the publication of articles most cited during the last decade.

The names of the “highly cited researchers“(Highly Cited Researchers) are extracted from the publications that are located in the 1% of the most cited by field and year of publication in the citation index collected in the”Web of Science”And identifies the research institutions and the countries where they are based.

The institutions or centers that contribute a greater number of researchers to this list are Harvard University (United States); the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Stanford University (United States); the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the United States; the Max Planck Society (Germany) or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.

This list of the ten most cited institutions is completed by the University of California Berkeley (United States); the University of Tsinghua (China); the University of California in San Diego (United States); and the University of Oxford (UK).

The data reveal that the United States is the country with the highest number among these researchers, with 2,622, and that although this country leads this classification of the “research influence”-24% of the articles indexed on the aforementioned website come from this country- that number and that influence has decreased in the last year.

China ranks second this year on that list, with 935 researchers among the “most cited”, Which represents 14.2% of the world total; The data released today reveal that this country has doubled that representation in the last four years.

The third place is for the United Kingdom, with 492 researchers (7.5% of the world); and Australia, with 332 scientists, has overtaken Germany in fourth place on the list; Next are the Netherlands, Canada, France, Spain and Switzerland.

Hong Kong has increased in number from 60 last year to 79 today, and for the first time they have entered the list of the world’s most influential scientists in their research fields from Bangladesh, Kuwait, Mauritius, Morocco and the Republic of Georgia. .

This year’s list incorporates 24 Nobel laureates, including five of those announced this year: David Julius, University of California, San Francisco (Physiology or Medicine); Ardem Patapoutian, from La Jolla, United States (Physiology or Medicine); David William Cross MacMillan, Princeton University (Chemistry); David Card, from the University of California Berkeley (Economics); and Guido Imbens, Stanford University (Economics).

The list includes 109 Spanish researchers, including Xavier Montalbán (Autonomous University of Barcelona); Rafael Duarte and Francisco José García-Vidal (from the Autonomous University of Madrid); Donat Markus (from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center); Pascual Unai (from the Center for Climate Change of the Basque Country); Jordi Martínez-Vilalta (from the Center for Ecological Research and Forest Applications); or José María Bermúdez de Castro (from the National Center for Research on Human Evolution).