Karnataka has 124 of top 2% scientists worldwide

A new list of 2% of top scientists worldwide has identified 1,494 scientists in India, out of which 124 are in Karnataka, primarily at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

The prestigious list was prepared by a team of scientists at Stanford University and published in the journal PLOS Biology. The full list contains over one lakh scientists worldwide who are ranked based on how many research papers have been published, plus their lifetime contribution to the specific fields of research.

In Karnataka, 93 of the scientists in the list were or are at the IISc, followed by seven at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), five at the National Centre of Biological Sciences (NCBS), four each at Bangalore University and the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL), two each at the Centre for Nano and Soft Matter Sciences (CeNS), the Institute of Wood Sciences and Technology, the Manipal Academy of Higher Sciences and the University of Mysore.

One scientist each was included from the Ramaiah Institute of Technology, JSS Science and Technology University and Praxis Business School.

The noted environmental scientist Dr T V Ramachandra of the IISc who was among those included expressed surprise at being informed about the list. “I had no idea about this. I was told by a fellow scientist in New Delhi just a few hours ago,” he said. “As a database, this is an invaluable list because it allows scientists to see who the other major players are in their respective fields,” he added.

He explained that the list appeared to have been generated by examining google citations and other online journal references.

Stanford University said that the database was created to provide updated analyses and a “publicly available database of 100,000 top scientists that provide standardised information on citations, h-index [an index to measure an individual’s scientific research output], a co-authorship adjusted hm-index, citations to papers in different authorship positions and a composite indicator.” Such a citation metric provides a basis to measure and reflect the impact of a published journal, the authors added.

The listed scientists are classified into 22 scientific fields and 176 sub-fields. Field and subfield-specific percentiles are also provided for all scientists who have published at least five papers. Career-long data is updated up to the end of 2019.