Scientists from all over the world cite researcher from Mülheim

Frank Neese is once again honored as “Highly Cited Researcher”

November 22, 2022

Each year the American company Clarivate Analytics honors scientists who are cited by a large number of research colleagues. Prof. Frank Neese, Director at the Max Planck Institut für Kohlenforschung, is among those top-ranked scientists - and thus one of only ten German chemists in these ranks.

The success of a scientific publication is measured, among other things, by how often it is cited by other researchers. Every November, U.S. company Clarivate Analytics publishes a list showing which scientists around the world are cited more frequently than the others. Frank Neese, Director at the Max Planck Institut für Kohlenforschung and Head of the Department of Molecular Theory and Spectroscopy, is one of the 6,938 "Global Highly Cited Researchers" - and not for the first time.

Neese has been recognized in his field of chemistry every year since Clarivate Analytics has published this list in 2015. The Americans' methodology is based on data provided by the Institute for Scientific Information. Specifically, it looks at publications that rank in the top one percent of citations by field and publication year in the Web of Science citation index. This year, a total of 270 chemists are among the nearly 7000 honorees. Only ten of them are Germans.

The success of ORCA

If one now thinks that Neese's impact factor can only be explained by the fact that experimental chemists need the theoretical underpinnings for their research is quite mistaken: "Theoretical chemistry is an extraordinarily rich field of research. It has its very own topics and challenges that have nothing to do with experimental chemistry in the first place," emphasizes Frank Neese.

These are, of course, just as important and worthy of research as other areas of chemistry. Nevertheless, it is true that the exponentially increasing demand for theoretical chemistry has to do with its now fairly high accuracy with which chemical phenomena can be calculated. "Also, the methods have become so efficient and easy to use that any chemist can easily integrate them into their daily work," Neese elaborates. That is largely a result of progress in the algorithms and software (like the ORCA program developed at the MPI Kofo), and, to a lesser extent, from the advances in hardware.

The rankings by Claricate Analytics are also sorted by country and research institution or university: Most of the top-ranked scientists come from the United States, followed by colleagues from China. German scientists are ranked fourth after those from Great Britain.

In an international comparison, the Max Planck Society does well: In the ranking of universities and research institutions, the Society takes the seventh place. According to Clarivate Analytics only American and Chinese universities are more influential than the Max Planck Society.

Other Interesting Articles

Go to Editor View