Influential record of extremely cited researchers now shuts out extra scientists: right here’s why

The creators of an influential list of highly cited researchers have shaken up their methodology this yr, taking a swipe at scientists who affiliate with these linked to doable moral breaches. The new guidelines have allowed the sector of arithmetic to return to the record, after being excluded for the previous two years owing to considerations over suspicious quotation patterns.

The Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) record is produced by the multinational data-analytics firm Clarivate, which additionally owns the Web of Science database. The record goals to acknowledge up to date researchers with “significant and broad influence”, who’re among the many authors of papers which might be within the prime 1% of their area by variety of citations. The programme acknowledges hundreds of people annually throughout 21 natural- and social-science fields and components into influential rankings of universities.

Thousands of extremely cited scientists have not less than one retraction

This yr, the record was compiled with a brand new step: exclusion of any papers with an creator who had been knocked off the earlier yr’s HCR record owing to research-integrity points. This signifies that anybody who routinely co-authored papers with somebody who’d been excluded within the earlier yr was much less prone to be acknowledged than earlier than the change.

“It’s quite a good idea. It’s a big cleaning,” says Lauranne Chaignon, a bibliometrician at PSL University in Paris, who has studied the HCR record¹. There is, she provides, a small likelihood of eradicating a deserving scientist.

This yr’s record, introduced as we speak, acknowledges 6,868 folks.

Gaming the system

Starting round 2016, HCR organizers seen an increase in suspicious exercise within the information used to compile the record, says David Pendlebury, head of analysis evaluation at Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). The difficulty grew to become most pronounced in maths: just a few folks have been publishing giant numbers of papers, particularly within the area of fractional differential equations. These authors steadily cited one another, inflicting others to fall off the HCR record. “A lot of these people were not known to us, and they were from institutions sometimes we’d never heard of,” says Pendlebury. “The world-famous mathematicians that we originally were seeing were disappearing.”

Maths is especially weak to gaming as a result of its metrics are small: mathematicians are likely to publish fewer papers with fewer co-authors and citations than do lecturers in different fields². “Just a few more citations into the system is quite disruptive,” says Pendlebury. As a consequence, Clarivate selected to omit the sector completely from the 2023 and 2024 lists.

Simple repair

The means of developing the HCR record begins with a ‘long list’ of about 200,000 papers and opinions which might be within the prime 1% of their area by quotation rely. The ISI workforce then whittles this down by eradicating retracted papers and people with greater than 30 authors (on which it’s laborious to find out particular person contributions), for instance.

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