Leading Melbourne scientists listed in database of standardised citation metrics

Each year there are a number of metrics published that attempt to rank scientists. One of the more detailed analyses is produced annually and was published in PLOS Biology in October 2020 [Ioannidis JPA, Boyack KW, Baas J (2020) Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators. PLoS Biol 18(10): e3000918. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000918]. The top 100,000 scientist in 22 major fields were selected from a dataset that included more than 7 million published authors.

Scientists were ranked according to h-index (an index to measure an individual’s scientific research output), co-authorship-adjusted hm-index, citations to papers in different authorship positions, and a composite indicator. Such citation metric provides a basis to measure and reflect the impact of a published journal. Particular attention was paid to self-citation rates and adjustments were made to the rankings based on this.

The first list was published in 2018 and the list is updated annually. A complementary list of the top 2 per cent of scientists in each discipline expanded the number of scientists named to over 160,000. That list included 6099 scientists in the field of clinical medicine of whom 1678 (27.5%) were Australian. Thirty-three per cent of the leading Australian scientists were Victorian.

Out of the 556 Victorians medical researchers named on the list, more than half of the leading scientists were affiliated directly with the Melbourne Medical School, its teaching hospitals and research institutes.