Conclusions

This study is the first of its kind to conduct a critical analysis of Stanford’s list of the World’s Top 2% Scientists. There are already several criticisms of such lists, which are frequently used as a metric for evaluating the impact and quality of a researcher’s work. Among these criticisms are:
(1) The popularity of a particular field or research topic greatly influences the list. Regardless of the quality of their work, researchers working in highly cited fields are more likely to be included on these lists.
(2) The list does not consider the quality of citations received by a researcher. A researcher may receive a large number of citations, but if the majority of them are from low-impact or low-quality sources, they may not accurately reflect the researcher’s work.
(3) The list does not include any early-career researchers. A young researcher may not have had enough time to accumulate a large number of citations, so the list may not give them the credit they deserve. Overall, the list of highly cited or top 2% researchers is a good indicator of impact, but it should not be used as the sole indicator of a researcher’s quality and impact, as it has limitations and biases.
However, more importantly, this research reveals that the so-called standardized database of the world’s top 2% of scientists is flawed. Among these flawed are:
(1) The database incorrectly listed researchers as first published in the nineteenth century and continued to publish until 2022.
(2) Many peculiar authors with low publication number and carrer lengths, for example, an author with only 2 papers but is ranked 612.
(3) Many authors with a large number of publications, and some of these are just news and editorial articles.
(4) Some of the authors listed in the database were journalists and editors, and their news articles were deemed “peer-reviewed” by this list.
(5) Some of the authors are an institute, not an individual
(6) Many authors with more than 50% self-citations in the list.
The study also discovered that there are deeply fundamental flaws in the so-called “databases of standardized citation indicators” which do not recognize if an author is a journalist and the articles are news articles. The use of such “standardized” ranking should not be encouraged.