Methods

To investigate any potential outliers in the world’s top 2% database of highly cited researchers, this study uses the “Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators” by Ioannidis, which can be found at https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw. This database includes standardized information on citations, career-long and recent year impact for 22 scientific fields, and includes scientists who are ranked at the 2% or above percentile in the sub-field. The version 5 of this database is based on a Sept 1, 2022 snapshot from Scopus [3].
The database contains standardized information on citations, career-long and recent year impact for 22 scientific fields. The list includes scientists who are ranked at the 2% or above percentile in the sub-field. The version 5 of this database is based on a Sept 1, 2022 snapshot from Scopus.
The study analyzes the database in terms of the number of papers published, year of first publication, year of most recent publication, number of years of publishing, number of papers per year, number of single authored papers, h-index as of end-2021, total cites 1996-2021, self-citation percentage, and no. cites/yr. The software MS Excel was used to compute the statistics (min, max, median) and identify statistical outliers.