Research & Discovery

January 19, 2021 | Mike Enright '88 (CLAS), University Communications

UConn Puts Eight On List Of World’s Most Highly-Cited Researchers

Eight University of Connecticut faculty members have been named to a list of the world’s most highly-cited researchers.

The University seal

UConn releases two reports that detail its response to safety issues this week. (Peter Morenus/UConn Photo)

Eight University of Connecticut professors have been named to a list of the world’s most highly-cited researchers.

The 2020 Highly Cited Researchers list, released recently by Clarivate and the Web of Science index, identifies scientists and social scientists who produced multiple papers ranking in the top one percent by citations for their field and year of publication, demonstrating significant research influence among their peers.

The UConn faculty on the list are:

  • Jacques Banchereau, professor of immunology at UConn Health, and director of the Immunological Sciences Lab at The Jackson Laboratory
  • Robin Chazdon, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering
  • Vijay A. Rathinam, associate professor of immunology and director of the Graduate Program in Immunology at UConn Health
  • Yijun Ruan, professor of genetics and genome sciences at UConn Health, and director of the Ruan Lab at The Jackson Laboratory
  • Mark Urban, Arden Chair and professor in ecology and evolutionary biology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Director of the Center of Biological Risk
  • George Weinstock, professor of genetics and genome sciences at UConn Health and Director of Microbial Genomics at The Jackson Laboratory
  • Roel Verhaak, professor of genetics and genome science at UConn Health and Associate Director of Computational Biology at The Jackson Laboratory
  • Zhe Zhu, assistant professor of remote sensing in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources.

Banchereau, Rathinam, Ruan, Urban and Verhaak were named to the list for the second year in a row.

The methodology that determines the listings draws on the data and analysis performed by the Institute for Scientific Information at the Web of Science Group.

The data is taken from 21 broad research fields within Essential Science Indicators. The fields are defined by sets of journals and exceptionally, in the case of multidisciplinary journals such as Nature and Science, by a paper-by-paper assignment to a field based on an analysis of the cited references in the papers. This percentile-based selection method removes the citation advantage of older papers relative to recently published ones, since papers are weighed against others in the same annual cohort.

The full 2020 Highly Cited Researchers list and executive summary can be found here, and the methodology can be found here.

Web of Science Group, a Clarivate Analytics company, organizes the world’s research information to enable academia, corporations, publishers and governments to accelerate the pace of research. It is powered by Web of Science, the world’s largest publisher-neutral citation index and research intelligence platform.