Stanford, Elsevier Release Latest World’s Top 2% Scientists Ranking

Stanford University and Elsevier have released the latest edition of the World’s Top 2% Scientists ranking, compiled by a research team led by John P. A. Ioannidis, professor at Stanford.

Released on October 7 local time, the ranking identifies researchers whose work ranks among the top 2% worldwide based on a range of citation-based measures. It covers scientists across 20 broad disciplines and 174 subfields.

The ranking comprises two lists: Career-long Impact, which measures researchers’ impact over their careers to date, and Single-year Impact, which assesses their impact during the previous year.

The analysis draws on data from Elsevier’s Scopus database and uses a composite of indicators, including total citations, the H-index, the co-authorship-adjusted HM-index, and citations to papers on which researchers are sole or first authors. Together, the indicators are intended to capture both research output and scholarly impact.

The latest Career-long Impact ranking includes 90,921 researchers from the United States, the largest number of any country, followed by 21,351 from the United Kingdom, 14,582 from mainland China, 12,809 from Germany, and 10,063 from Canada.

In the Single-year Impact ranking, the United States again has the largest number of researchers, with 73,638, followed by mainland China with 37,201, the United Kingdom with 18,301, Germany with 10,939, and Australia with 8,971.

The ranking is based on citation data for roughly 10 million scientists worldwide and is intended to provide a standardized measure of researchers’ scholarly influence across disciplines.

World’s Top 2% Scientists Career-long Impact ranking

World’s Top 2% Scientists Single-year Impact ranking