Clarivate Ranks Most-Cited Researchers of 2017

China shows the biggest increase of any country in the number of scientists listed since last year, while cancer genomics emerges as one of the more dominant fields.

Written byCatherine Offord

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ISTOCK, MATJAZ SLANICAround half of the world’s “Highly Cited Researchers” are based in the U.S., with the U.K. and China taking second and third place, respectively, according to a new report by Clarivate Analytics.

The list was assembled on the basis of authors’ recent production of “Highly Cited Papers”—those that have enough citations to be ranked in the top 1 percent of articles published in the same year and field. By this ranking system, the U.S. has 1,644 highly cited authors—a 12 percent increase since last year. China currently has 249 highly cited authors—a jump of more than 40 percent since last year, and the largest increase of any nation.

“The rise of China in publication output and world share in internationally influential journals indexed in the Web of Science has been a dramatic development during the last 20 years,” David Pendlebury, senior citations analyst at Clarivate Analytics, says in a statement. “In some fields China has not only ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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