INSTITUTE FOR POLICY RESEARCH

Effort to Standardize Citation Rankings Shows Impact of IPR Experts’ Research

IPR faculty rank globally among the 2% of most-cited researchers in their fields

More than 30 IPR faculty have been recognized as being among the top 2% most cited academics in their respective fields, according to a database published in PLOS Biology by Stanford University researchers.

The 35 IPR experts are top ranked for citations in diverse fields, including artificial intelligence, economics, education, evolutionary biology, sociology, political science, and social psychology.

"IPR is proud that so many of our scholars have been recognized to be at the top of their fields," said IPR Director and economist Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach. "Research excellence is core to our mission."

The database is part of an effort, led by Stanford researcher John Ioannidis, to standardize various academic citation rankings. It ranks scientists around the world on the impact of their research publications over their careers and for a particular year. Citations are important in academia as they figure prominently in hiring, tenure, and other key decisions.

In all, nearly 600 Northwestern faculty are ranked in the top 2% of citations, including Nobel prize-winning chemist Sir Fraser Stoddart, sociologist Gary Fine, and chemist Milan Mrksich, who is Northwestern's vice president for research.

For their second release of "Science-Wide Author Databases of Standardized Citation Indicators," Ioannidis and his colleagues updated the dataset with new features and methods, such as using a machine-learning approach to organize scientists into 22 field and 176 subfield classifications.

The researchers examined nearly 8 million scientists, pulling citations from between 1996 and 2019 from Scopus, an academic database that regroups more than 34,000 peer-reviewed journals. As with the initial dataset covering 1996–2018, the top 100,000 cited scholars were ranked according to six citation metrics—covering, for example, the total number of citations and those as a single or a first author. These six metrics were then combined into one composite indicator.

In their 2019 PLOS Biology article introducing the first version, the researchers wrote that they hope the freely available dataset will allow for more "nuanced use of metrics."

View most recent dataset.

IPR Top-Cited Faculty by Subfield*

Emma Adam, Psychiatry

Bernard Black, Economics

David Cella, Oncology and Carcinogenesis

Edith Chen, Public Health

Cynthia Coburn, Education

Noshir Contractor, Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing

Thomas Cook, Social Sciences Methods

James Druckman, Political Science and Public Administration

Alice Eagly, Social Psychology

Joe Feinglass, General and Internal Medicine

David Figlio, Economics

Eli Finkel, Social Psychology

Larry V. Hedges, Education

Dean Karlan, Economics

Brayden King, Business and Management

Kristen Knutson, Neurology and Neurosurgery

Christopher Kuzawa, Evolutionary Biology

Charles Manski, Economics

Thomas McDade, Evolutionary Biology

Greg Miller, Psychiatry

Daniel Mroczek, Social Psychology

Brian Mustanski, Public Health

Daniel O'Keefe, Communication and Media Studies

Benjamin Page, Political Science and Public Administration

Lincoln Quillian, Sociology

James Rosenbaum, Education

Paola Sapienza, Economics

Wesley Skogan, Criminology

James Spillane, Education

Seth Stein, Geochemistry and Geophysics

Jennifer Tackett, Clinical Psychology

Linda Teplin, Psychiatry

Christopher Udry, Economics

Brian Uzzi, Sociology

Sandra Waxman, Experimental Psychology

*in Science-Wide Author Databases of Standardized Citation Indicators, Version 2

Published: April 20, 2021.