|
January 2001
ISIHighlyCited.com is the more recent of two major projects at
ISI that used citation analysis to identify influential scientists
throughout the world. The initial project, from 1981, noted
the work of 73 physicists among the most extensively cited
scientific authors. ISIHighlyCited.com currently features 99
Physicists. Some discussion of the relationship between these
projects allows us to compare the resulting lists.
In the summer of 2000, ISI® began to identify and contact
individual scientists and scholars whose published works have had
measurable influence on the science and technology of the past two
decades. This
was the beginning of ISIHighlyCited.com. The project, while
unprecedented in scope, is not without forerunners in the long history
of citation analysis at ISI.
In 1981, Dr. Eugene
Garfield, the founder and now Chairman Emeritus of ISI, identified scientists whose publications received the highest number
of citations in the preceding decade. Dr. Garfield was aware that the
references authors made to one another’s work was a valuable
indication of the technical and intellectual precursors to a
published work, and he had made productive use of this metric to
spotlight influential articles. Changing the perspective to consider
not a single work, but a body of work developed by a scientist
enabled him to acknowledge those researchers whose work generates avid and consistent
citation across many years. Authors of this caliber have had,
inarguably, a significant effect on the development of their
discipline.
Dr. Garfield’s study
resulted in a series of articles about "The 1,000 Contemporary
Scientists Most Cited 1965-1978" (view the full text here).
When ISIHighlyCited.com revisited citation analysis at the
level of the individual researcher, we chose to learn from rather
than to continue the earlier effort. Shifting the time-frame to the
years 1981-1999 allowed us to work with researchers who have
contributed to recent developments in a time of such rapid and
exciting advances in science and technology. The majority of the
scientists featured in ISIHighlyCited.com are publishing articles
today which doubtless will become aspects of the scientific canon in
coming years.
A further expansion of the
effort depended on dividing the published articles into categories,
according to the ISI indexing of their source journal. The earlier
project made no preliminary distinction of the subject in which the
author had published, but considered gross citation rate across all
articles in the multidisciplinary ISI holdings. Publication and
citation practices differ markedly between subjects, and the list of
1,000 scientists was disproportionately weighted to biomedical
fields, where the enormous volume of publications generates large
citation counts. Indeed, of the 1,000 names on this list, only 73
researchers identified Physics as their field of study. The goal for
ISIHighlyCited.com was to feature those individuals who have had
exceptional influence within their field, not to compare the overall
citation numbers across fields. By identifying the subject of study
as Physics in the first steps of our analysis, we made the data more
sensitive to key contributors within the field. To date, we have
identified 99 of the most cited physicists of the past 20 years,
and, in the coming months, we will expand this list to approximately
250 names (view the current list here).
Despite the differences
between
the two projects, the existence of the two lists results in an
interesting view of the past 35 years of research and publication in
Physics. Because the analyses were mutually exclusive, with articles
and citations in the first analysis contributing no data to
ISIHighlyCited.com, the eight physicists appearing both on the
"1,000 Authors" list and in the ISIHighlyCited.com Physics
category are clearly visible as leaders in their field for most of
the past four decades – an extraordinary accomplishment. The names
and contributions of these men are well known, and their influence
of their work is undeniable. Click on the link to view their records
in ISIHighlyCited.com for information about their publications,
professional activities, education and current research:
* Note: At the time of this
writing, detailed curriculum vitae and publication information had not been
received for these authors. Rather than fail to acknowledge their
scientific contributions, we have composed their record using a
minimum of data drawn exclusively from the ISI database.
At the time the 1981 list
was published, seven of the most-cited Physicists had been
recipients of a Nobel Prize in Physics (Philip Warren Anderson, Nicolaas Bloembergen,
Sheldon Lee Glashow, T.D. Lee, Nevill F. Mott, Burton Richter, Steven Weinberg), and one has
since received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (Alan Heeger). The
ISIHighlyCited.com Physics category contains six Nobel Laureates (Daniel C. Tsui,
J. Georg Bednorz,
K. Alexander Müller,
Gerd
Binnig, Philip Warren Anderson,
Alan J Heeger).
Dr. Garfield viewed the development of extraordinary citation
rates as a way to reveal scientists whose work is "of
Nobel Class," whether or not this particular honor accrues to
the individual. This assessment is well demonstrated in
ISIHighlyCited.com.
|
