Web interface for the list of the world's top 2% scientists

This is the complete data table from Ioannidis (2024) for career-long citations up to 2023. The indicators (column headers in the following table) are spelled out in the "Key" tab, above. The single-year citation metrics were made accessible by Data Meta Lab.

Search author ranks by institution. Partial search words are matched ("contain" relationship) and a logical AND operator is applied to multiple filters; check results and refine search criteria as needed. Note that the chart is sorted by subfield 1 rank to account for different citation practices between disciplines.

Search author ranks by field (e.g. Social Sciences) or subfield (e.g. Geography). These fields are automatically generated by Ioannidis (2024) from the SCOPUS citation database; some authors may not be attributed to their expected area of expertise. You can also add a country filter, e.g. to view only Canadian geographers.

Search individual records of the world's top 2% scientists by career-long citations up to 2023. Remember that academic performance metrics have many limitations; make sure to examine the methodology developed by Ioannidis et al. (2016, 2019, and 2020), or read the FAQ document on the Elsevier data download page.

Filter by institution, country, or (sub)field, and view resulting count of authors and averages for number of publications, first year on record, c-score, rank, and subfield rank. See below for a map of average first year by country.

Explanation of indicators and statistics for top-level categories (fields of expertise). The addition of (ns) or _ns to an indicator name refers to the version of the indicator that excludes self-citations. Author counts and average ranks per category are charted below the key.

Web page, database filters, and charts created by Dr. Claus Rinner on the basis of data by Ioannidis (2024). I teach geospatial decision support techniques in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. My research expertise includes multi-criteria evaluation, the concept behind creating composite indices such as the c-score that the world's top scientists list is based on. I wrote a short news item for my Department about last year's list.

The methodology used to develop the ranking was first documented in Ioannidis et al. (2016), with updates in 2019 and 2020. Prof. John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist and biomedical data scientist at Stanford University, together with two research consultants, created the c-score from several individual citation metrics. Applying the c-score to the Scopus citation database, they derived rankings of global scientists representing career-long as well as single-year impact. Inclusion in the list of the world's top 2% scientists requires a rank among the most-cited 100,000 authors globally or a rank within the top 2% in each subfield (area of expertise).

Prof. Ioannidis is an eminent scholar who appears at rank 22 of scientists worldwide for his career-long impact. He is no stranger to those of us who critically examined the COVID-19 pandemic and public health response over the last four years and counting. Ioannidis was one of the few scientists who conducted reliable statistical analyses of key pandemic metrics such as the infection-fatality rate, correctly estimating it at an order of magnitude lower than what we were made to believe by the early "scientific consensus"; cautioned against fear mongering; questioned the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions when their obvious harms were taken into account; put his finger on failed epidemiological forecasting models; and analyzed the negative impacts of the pandemic on the scientific process itself. "Out to see" is a wonderful 75-minute documentary film with and about John Ioannidis.

As an aside, two recent publications of mine about the pandemic response could use some TLC in terms of citations: (1) I wrote a book chapter on "Pandemic Open Data: Blessing or Curse?", in which I outline the data issues behind not only the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" but also three other false narratives. (2) In the article "Unexpected patterns in the global COVID-19 pandemic data", I show that the mobility restrictions and medical campaigns of 2020-2022 are, in most countries and continents, associated with negative public health outcomes; in other words, the measures may have done more harm than good, even with respect to the intended outcomes, never mind their unintended side effects.

With my long-standing interest in open data, I appreciate that Elsevier, the publisher of the world's scientists ranking, provides access to the annual data updates of the career-long and single-year author lists, including the 2024 update. The available files include an informative FAQ list. This web site is based on "Table_1_Authors_career_2023_pubs_since_1788_wopp_extracted_202408.xlsx". The spreadsheet contains some 220,000 records (rows) and is thus too large for a simple Web presentation and search. This site, which is generously hosted as a Github Page, employs DataPages filled on-the-fly by the Caspio database service in response to your queries in the search tabs. The Caspio service is paid through the knowledge dissemination funds of my NSERC Discovery Grant "Location, Time, and Scale in GIS-Based Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis - Advancing the Agenda".