Two CAPRISA researchers listed among world's most highly cited researchers

Professors Salim Abdool Karim and Lynn Morris of CAPRISA are on the list of the world's most highly cited researchers, published this week by the Web of Science's Clarivate Analytics.

CAPRISA Honorary Research Associates Professors Bruce Walker and Dan Barouch are also on this list, which includes 6 078 scientists: 4 058 scientists for outstanding contributions in one of 21 fields of the sciences and social sciences, while 2 020 scientists for having exceptional performance across multiple fields.

Only 10 South African scientists (primary affiliation in South Africa) are on the list. By university affiliation, there are three scientists from the University of Cape Town (UCT), two in each of University of Stellenbosch (US), University of Pretoria (UP) and University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), and one from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN).

The South African scientists on the list are Abdool Karim (CAPRISA/UKZN), Eric Bateman (UCT), Lee Berger (Wits), William Bond (UCT), Steven Chown (US), Lynn Morris (CAPRISA/NICD/Wits), David Richardson (US), Dan Stein (UCT), Bernard Slippers (UP) and Michael Wingfield (UP). There are four foreign scientists with secondary affiliations at South African universities on the list.

Berger is listed for the field of general social sciences; Morris for the field of microbiology; Richardson for environment/ecology; Slippers and Wingfield for plant/animal science; while Abdool Karim, Bateman, Bond, Chown and Stein are listed for contributions across multiple fields.

This year's list includes 17 Nobel laureates, including two of this year's prize winners. More than 40% (n=2 639) of the 2018 Highly Cited Researchers are from the United States. The second ranked country is the United Kingdom, with 546 (9%) of the listed researchers, followed by China with 482 (7.9%) of the researchers. The other seven countries with 100 or more listed researchers are Germany (356), Australia (245), The Netherlands (189), Canada (166), France (157), Switzerland (133), and Spain (115).

Clarivate Analytics, which is part of the Web of Science, produced this 2018 annual list of the world's most influential researchers by citations in the sciences and social sciences. Researchers are included in this list based on their exceptional research performance, determined by production of multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in Web of Science for the period 2006 to 2016. An alternate criterion for selection is a citation count to highly cited papers that ranks a researcher in the top 1% by citations in a field of research for the period 2006-2016.

For more details and to access the full list, see: https://hcr.clarivate.com/#.