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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 author’s 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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