Contact and FAQ

This year, 7,225 Highly Cited Researcher 2022 designations are issued to 6,938 individuals. The number of awards exceeds the number of unique individuals because some researchers are receiving recognition in more than one Essential Science Indicators™ (ESI) field of research. Our analysis of countries/regions and institutions counts designations or appearances and is thus based on the total of 7,225.

This year Clarivate partnered with Retraction Watch and extended the qualitative analysis of the Highly Cited Researchers list, addressing increasing concerns over potential misconduct (such as plagiarism, image manipulation, fake peer review). With the assistance of Retraction Watch and its unparalleled database of retractions, Clarivate analysts searched for evidence of misconduct in all publications of those on the preliminary list of Highly Cited Researchers. Researchers found to have committed scientific misconduct in formal proceedings conducted by a researcher’s institution, a government agency, a funder or a publisher are excluded from the list of Highly Cited Researchers.

We do not count highly cited papers that have been retracted. Researchers found to have committed scientific misconduct in formal proceedings conducted by a researcher’s institution, a government agency, a funder, or a publisher, are excluded from our list of Highly Cited Researchers. Last year, we also began to exclude a small number of researchers whose citation record exhibited usually high levels of self-citation. For the procedure, see: Adams, J., Pendlebury, D. and Szomszor, M., “How Much is Too Much? The Difference between Research Influence and Self-Citation Excess,” Scientometrics, 123 (2):1119–1147, May 2020.

To ensure correct attribution of papers to authors, we used a combination of algorithmically disambiguating author information and manual inspection of highly cited papers. Manual review of the highly cited papers attributed to an author involves the examination of author identifiers, emails, the subject of the papers as well as the journals in which they were published, review of the institutional addresses, and inspection of co-authorships. Often this was sufficient to resolve questions of authorship for a unique individual.

Original papers were sometimes consulted to obtain a full name not present in the Web of Science™ bibliographic record (some journals do not publish full author names). Reference was made to websites of researchers themselves and their curricula vitae if questions remained, which sometimes arose when a researcher changed institutional affiliations several times during the period surveyed.

We would like to think our efforts to resolve authorship questions resulted in 100% clean data, but with any such effort and about 7,000 researchers, we likely fell short in some few specific instances and will make adjustments where required.

We understand that you identify yourself as a mathematician, but we found your greatest influence, according to our analysis, to be in Engineering as it is defined in Essential Science Indicators™. There is no universally agreed field classification scheme, and the use of journals to define fields is approximate at best. The practical advantage of our method is that we can fairly compare individuals against one another in the same consistently defined sphere.

In 2018 we introduced a new Cross-Field category that identifies researchers who have contributed to highly cited papers across several different fields. This is the fifth year that we are identifying researchers with cross-field influence.

Please refer to the Methodology section for more information about this category.

If you had a sufficient number of highly cited papers and total citations to publications assigned to the ESI field Geosciences, you would have been selected and named in that field and not named a Highly Cited Researcher in the Cross-Field category. Instead, a tally of all your highly cited papers, not only in Geosciences but also in Engineering and in Environment/Ecology, revealed a publication and citation record equivalent to those selected in any one or more ESI fields. In other words, you qualified for selection through the combination of highly cited papers in several fields, demonstrating superior multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary influence.

To list you in Geosciences would misrepresent the measure by which those selected for that field were chosen and the manner in which you qualified for selection in a different class.

Not necessarily, although there are many researchers who, in fact, appear on both the old and new lists. The period of analysis used for the new list is limited to 2011 to 2021. As the eleven-year window of citation evaluation moves along a year, it is normal that many new people enter the list and some people return to the list for consecutive years – but this is in no way guaranteed. Clarivate retains and provides previous years’ lists along with the new list – see our HCR list archive. In any case, once a researcher is designated a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate, that researcher is always deemed a Highly Cited Researcher in our view.

The specific methodology used in generating the new list can turn up researchers – even so-called junior researchers – who have contributed multiple highly cited papers during 2011 to 2021, whereas more senior and even more cited scientists may not have been identified because they did not publish as many Highly Cited Papers in a field (as we defined it) or across fields during this period.

We believe the result aligns with our goal: the identification of researchers with substantial contemporary influence as measured by the number of highly cited papers produced, even if those papers, in terms of total citations, do not sum to more than that of other researchers who have longer publication and higher citation records over their entire careers.

The current process uses the whole counting method for papers and citations – i.e. every author on a paper was apportioned equal credit.

With the increase of papers resulting from large teams, we continue to explore whether there is advantage to fractional counting.

We exclude from consideration any paper with more than 30 authors or group authorship in all ESI fields and in the cross-field category.

For more information on this change in methodology, please refer to the Methodology section.

An asterisk accompanying a primary affiliation indicates that the Highly Cited Researcher is associated with this institution through a research fellowship. This rarely occurs since most researchers follow the established tradition of using the secondary affiliation for such appointments and reserve the primary affiliation slot for their main employer. There may well be such associations for other Highly Cited Researchers that have not been brought to our attention.

This year we extended the identification of affiliated or guest researchers, designating these as Research Fellows or Associates. These individuals were not counted in our own ranking of nations or institutions.

Each year, during our month-long validation period, we contact researchers on several occasions using a personalized survey link to verify how they would like their name to appear and the locations of their primary and, if applicable, secondary research affiliations. We prompt the researcher on multiple occasions to verify their details over the course of the validation period which typically lasts 4- 6 weeks. The personal survey link allows us to accurately track and keep a record of all institutional affiliation requests.

We would appreciate your feedback! Please contact us at Clarivate Customer Care.

These lists are available as Excel files in the Past lists section of the Highly Cited Researchers website.

We are not able to change the affiliation name after the validation period or after the publication of the annual HCR list.

Please contact the researcher in question and ask them to reach out to wosg.support@clarivate.com to update their information.