Citations of Excellence

Ten UC Santa Barbara researchers have been named to Thomson Reuters’ 2015 list of Highly Cited Researchers. The annual list recognizes researchers in the sciences and social sciences from around the world whose work has had major impact in their fields. The list includes scientists whose papers rank in the top 1 percent by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science.

The highly cited UCSB researchers for 2015 are:

Guillermo C. Bazan, Materials

Steven D. Gaines, Environment/Ecology

Arthur C. Gossard, Physics

Craig J. Hawker, Chemistry

Alan J. Heeger, Chemistry, and also Materials

Kevin D. Lafferty, Environment/Ecology

Samir Mitragotri, Pharmacology & Toxicology

Daniel Moses, Materials

Thuc-Quyen Nguyen, Materials

Joshua P. Schimel, Agricultural Sciences

According to Thomson Reuters, the 2015 list is generated through the compilation of data from 2003 to 2013, which included 120,793 highly cited papers. Author names, which were assigned to most frequently occurring categories, were then ranked by number of highly cited papers. To determine the number of authors to include in the new list, the square root of the number of authors was calculated for each field, which in turn represented the threshold number of highly cited papers required for an individual to be included in the final list.

The only exception to this methodology was in the field of physics, which often tended to produce highly cited high-energy physics papers with hundreds of author names, which in turn overweighted the physics author population toward high-energy physics and excluded authors in other sub-fields. Thompson Reuters’ calculation therefore eliminated from consideration any paper with more than 30 institutional addresses in the Physics category.

The final new list for 2015 contains about 3,000 highly cited researchers in 21 fields of the sciences and social sciences.