April 21, 2003
Awards and Honors
Four faculty recognized
as "Highly Cited Researchers"
Four UCSC faculty members are among the most highly cited researchers
in their fields, according to the Institute for Scientific Information
(ISI). ISI, a Philadelphia-based company that specializes in analyzing
the scientific literature, is compiling lists of the top 250 most cited
authors in various categories and posting the results on a web
site.
UCSC faculty on the lists posted so far include Sandra Faber,
University Professor of astronomy and astrophysics, and Stan Woosley,
professor and chair of astronomy and astrophysics, both in the space
sciences category; Thorne Lay, professor of Earth sciences, in
the geosciences category; and John Thompson, professor of ecology
and evolutionary biology, in the ecology/environment category.
ISI's Highly Cited Researchers project is based on analysis of some
19 million articles in the ISI citation database for the years 1981
to 1999. According to ISI's Marie McVeigh, citation is a key measure
of influence in science and technology. In a description of the project
on the ISI web site, McVeigh writes:
"When one researcher refers to the work of another, they are,
in essence, acknowledging the influence that work has had on their own.
There is no better set of experts regarding ground-breaking work than
the community of researchers in a field, and ISI's database contains
millions of citation relationships, each one derived from one authors
reference to another. Accumulated across many years and millions of
articles, this information becomes a statistically powerful resource
for finding individual authors who have formed or changed the course
of research in a subject."
The ongoing project will eventually list 250 highly cited researchers
in each of 21 categories.
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