Harvard University employs more highly cited researchers than any other institution in the world.
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U.S. researchers once again dominate the world’s most highly cited researchers, an annual list composed by Clarivate that identifies the most influential researchers in the sciences and social sciences from around the globe. And Harvard University led all institutions in the employment of these headline researchers.
The 2021 list, which was released last month, contains about 3,800 highly cited researchers working in 21 fields in the sciences and social sciences. The list focuses on contemporary research achievements, analyzing highly cited papers in science and social sciences journals indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection during the 11-year period 2010-2020. Highly cited papers are defined as those that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year.
The data used by Clarivate, a leading data analytics company, to identify highly cited researchers comes from Essential Science Indicators (ESI), 2010-2020, which included approximately 169,000 highly cited papers.
The Top Ten Countries
The United States was home to the highest number of highly cited researchers with 2,622, accounting for almost 40% of the world’s total. The U.S. share was down a bit from 41.5% in 2020, 44.0% in 2019, and 43.3% in 2018. But its overall dominance of the list is indicated by this statistic: of all the papers indexed in the Web of Science between 2010 and 2020, 24.7 had at least one U.S. author.
China came in second, with 934 researchers making the list. As a sign of its growing scientific influence, China has doubled its share of highly cited researchers in just the past four years.
The United Kingdom claimed third, with 492 researchers (7.5% of the total). Australia came in fourth, (332), edging out Germany, which came in fifth with 331 researchers.
Rounding out the top 10 were:
- the Netherlands with 207 researchers, a remarkable achievement given its relatively small population,
- Canada (196),
- France (146),
- Spain (109),
- and Switzerland (102).
The Top Ten Insitutions
Harvard University had the most highly cited researchers (214) of any institution in the world. The rest of the top ten were:
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (194)
- Stanford University (122)
- National Institute of Health (93)
- Max Plank Society (70)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (64)
- University of California, Berkeley (62)
- Tsinghua University (58)
- University of California, San Diego (56)
- University of Oxford (50)
Of the top ten institutions in the world, six were in the U.S. In addition, the U.S. accounted for 15 of the top 20 in the world, with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, UCLA, University of California at San Francisco, Yale, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Washington University and Cornell making the list. This year, highly cited researchers were identified at more than 1,300 institutions all over the world.
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Research citations are by no means the only indictor of the impact or importance of scientific research. But they are an influential measure, considered by faculty peers, academic departments, university leaders and funding agencies when they make judgements about hiring, promotion and tenure, grant funding, and the allocation of institutional resources.
The fact that so many U.S researchers are included on this list indicates that their scientific colleagues respect and follow their investigations closely. It’s also testament to the robust research infrastructure that U.S. institutions have built and the scientific environment that allows premier science to flourish.
