Members of Future Earth Science Committee listed among ‘The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds 2014’

Thomson Reuters, a leading producer of bibliometric statistics and one of the main sources of impact factors used in the assessment of scientific articles and careers, have published a new list of some 3,200 highly cited researchers in the natural and social sciences, whom they identify as some of the world's leading scientific minds.

Sandra Díaz and Bradley Cardinale, both members of the Future Earth Science Committee, feature in the list under the Environment and Ecology category.

Highly Cited Researchers are – for the purposes of this database – defined as authors who have written multiple highly cited reports, and are therefore considered to be making a central contribution to ongoing research in their respective fields.

The report is intended to update and complement a 2001 list published on the website www.isihighlycited.com, which identified more than 7,000 researchers who were the most cited in one or more of 21 broad fields of the sciences and social sciences, fields similar to those used in the Essential Sciences Indicators (ESI) database.

In order to identify influential researchers, Thomson Reuters surveyed articles and reviews in science and social science journals indexed in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science Core Collection between 2002 and 2012.

Rather than using total citations as a measure of influence or impact, only highly cited papers were considered. Highly cited papers are defined as those that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year indexed in the Web of Science.

Those researchers who – within an ESI-defined field – published highly cited papers were judged to be influential, so the production of multiple top 1% papers was interpreted as a mark of exceptional impact. The determination of how many researchers to include in the list for each field was based on the numbers of author names appearing on all Highly Cited Papers in that field between 2002 and 2012. The ESI fields vary greatly in size, with Clinical Medicine being the largest and Space Science (Astronomy and Astrophysics) the smallest.

Thomson Reuters agree that there are some limitations to this methodology, stating that there are, of course, many highly accomplished and influential researchers who are not recognized by this list, or by other comparable efforts to measure influence or impact.

More information on the methodology – and access to the full database – can be found online.