Six From UConn Named to World’s Highly Cited Research List

The list identifies researchers who produced multiple papers ranking in the top one percent by citations for their field and year of publication

One of UConn's most visible individuals speaks about UConn's journey to this point.

Six UConn researchers have been named among the most highly cited in their fields (UConn Photo).

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

The 2021 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:

  • 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
  • Yangchao Luo, associate professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources
  • Rebecca Puhl, professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences and deputy director at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health
  • Vijay A. Rathinam, associate professor of immunology and director of the Graduate Program in Immunology at the UConn School of Medicine
  • George Weinstock, professor of genetics and genome sciences at the UConn School of Medicine and Professor, Evnin Family Chair and Director of Microbial Genomics 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

Rathinam was named to the list for the third year in a row while Chazdon, Weinstock, and Zhu were named 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 2021 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.