Highly Cited Researchers from Clarivate Analytics is an annual list recognizing leading researchers in the sciences and social sciences from around the world. The final new list contains about 3,400 Highly Cited Researchers in 21 fields of the sciences and social sciences.
The 2017 list focuses on contemporary research achievement: only Highly Cited Papers in science and social sciences journals indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection during the 11-year period 2005-2015 were surveyed. Highly Cited Papers are defined as those that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science. This data derives from Essential Science Indicators (ESI). The fields are also those employed in ESI – 21 broad fields defined by sets of journals and exceptionally, in the case of multidisciplinary journals such as Nature and Science, by a paper-by-paper assignment to a field. This percentile-based selection method removes the citation advantage of older published papers relative to recently published ones, since papers are weighed against others in the same annual cohort.