Eleven UESTC Scholars Are Listed on Highly-cited Scientists in the World

11 UESTC Scholars Are Listed on Highly-cited Scientists in the World

On November 15, the world's 2017 list of top-cited scientists was issued. There were 11 scholars from UESTC (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), closely following Tsinghua University (15), Peking University (13) and Zhejiang University (13) , ranked No. 4. Among them, new comers from UESTC occupy the first place among the mainland universities. Scholars in fields of engineering, chemistry, neuroscience and behavioral science and physics are selected for the first time. The scholars selected all take UESTC as the first unit. They are Liang Yingkchang, Zhu Feng, Wei Guiwu in computer science, Ma Yi in engineering field, Bharat B Biswal in neuroscience and behavioral science, Hor Yew San in physics, Qin Xiaolong, Li Songxiao, Yao Yonghong, and Sunyoung Cho in mathematics.

The list of highly-cited scientists selects more than 3,000 scientific elites who published more than 130,000 highly-cited papers in 21 fields belonging to natural sciences and social sciences from 900 institutions. The 2017 list enumerates the most highly cited researchers in the corresponding subject areas in the past 10 years. Among them, those from the United States reaches 1644, an increase of 12% over 2016. Britain ranks the second with 344 researchers selected. China (excluding Taiwan) ranks the third with 249 researchers selected, achieving the growth of 41%.

As for excellent institutions in the 2017 Highly Cited Scientists List, American academic institutions come out on top with 109 scholars from Harvard University and 64 from Stanford University; 47 from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, 44 from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Among universities in mainland China, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Zhejiang University and University of Electronic Science and Technology of China have made outstanding achievements with more than 10 candidates respectively.

Taking up ESI (Essential Science IndicatorsSM) database and results from Web of ScienceTM the research platform as the basis, bibliometric experts acquired their unique system of indexes about research performance and scientific development trends and thus made their selection of world-wide highly-cited scientists, which indicates that the number of highly cited papers (that is, the citation influence ranks the top 1%) published by the selected candidates is the most in corresponding subject areas.

It is reported that the list is released by Clarivate Analytics (the former Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property and Technology Division) . The number of highly cited scientists or ESI highly cited papers plays an important role in university assessment or subject assessment at home and abroad. For example, in the ranking of ShanghaiRanking’s Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) , the number of highly cited scientistsparallel with the number of Nobel Prize and Fields Medal alumni and faculty members, is an important indicator of the academic influence of a university.

Translator: Zhang Guihua