2025 Analysis

The Highly Cited Researchers 2025 list identifies and celebrates individuals who have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their fields of research. Through rigorous selection criteria and comprehensive analysis, we recognize researchers whose exceptional and community-wide contributions shape the future of science, technology and academia globally.

This program also emphasizes our commitment to research integrity. Our evaluation and selection process continues to evolve with filters to address issues including hyper-prolific authorship, excessive self-citation, anomalous publication and citation patterns and profiles, ensuring that recognized researchers meet the benchmarks we require for this program.

An exploration of this global landscape of top-tier research talent provides us with insights on global research and innovation trends.

This year Clarivate has designated 7,131 Highly Cited Researcher awards to 6,868 individuals. Some researchers have been recognized in more than one Essential Science Indicators (ESI) field, resulting in more designations than individual awardees. This analysis, which includes the distribution of designations across nations and institutions, reflects the impact of these 6,868 individuals, distributed across fields, in accordance with the size of each.

The table below summarizes the number of researcher designations by field of research and the cross-field category.

This year’s Highly Cited Researchers work in 60 countries and regions, yet 86.1% of awards are concentrated in just 10 of them − and 74.6% in the first five alone − highlighting a remarkable concentration of top global research talent.

Our analysis is based on primary researcher affiliations, drawn from the scholarly records (i.e. the contact details on their Highly Cited Papers in ESI), combined with updates requested by the researchers themselves.

The United States has the highest concentration of awards in the world with 2,670 in 2025. This amounts to 37.4% of the group. It is a modest increase of 1.0% in world share from last year, which was 36.4%. Previously, the U.S. share had been gradually declining – 37.5% in 2023, 38.3% in 2022, 39.7% in 2021, 41.5% in 2020, 44.0% in 2019 and 43.3% in 2018.

Mainland China maintains its second position again this year, with 1,406 awards (19.7%). This represents a small increase in absolute numbers of researchers, but a slight loss of 0.7% in world share as compared to 2024, which was then 20.4%. Previously the world share of awards from Mainland China had been steadily increasing (17.9% in 2023, 16.2% in 2022, 14.2% in 2021, 12.1% in 2020, 10.2% in 2019 and 7.9% in 2018). Mainland China has still more than doubled its share of the awards population since 2018.

The United Kingdom, with 570 awards (8.0%), is in third spot again this year, followed by Germany (363), Australia (312), Canada (227), the Netherlands (194), Hong Kong SAR (145), Switzerland (130), and France (121). Switzerland this year has again entered the top 10, whereas Singapore, tenth last year, has fallen out. France moved from ninth to tenth place.

These figures do not include instances in which a Highly Cited Researcher opted to list a Research Fellowship affiliation rather than a permanent home base as their primary institution. We do not recognize a Research Fellowship as a primary affiliation when a researcher has a permanent position elsewhere.

1.0%
Gain in share of Highly Cited Researcher awards for the United States this year

The table below lists the 52 institutions that are home to 27 or more Highly Cited Researcher awards. We employed the same threshold last year, which produced a table of 50 organizations.

This year, as last year, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks first, with 258, followed by Harvard University (170), Stanford University (141), and Tsinghua University (91). Among others in the top 10, MIT (85) has moved into fifth from sixth last year, taking the place of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (84). University of Oxford (59), University College London (59), University of Pennsylvania (59), and the Max Planck Society continue to be highly ranked. Max Planck has gained significantly in number of awards (to 66 from 56 in 2024), rising from ninth to seventh place.

We observe more change in the middle and lower portions of the table. New entrants include the Broad Institute (43), ETH Zurich (36), New York University (30), Wuhan University (29), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (28), Princeton (28), Adelaide University (27), University of Texas at Austin (27), and Wageningen University and Research (27). Organizations that appeared in the Top 50 last year but not this year include three institutions from the United States, and one each from Belgium, France, Israel, and the United Kingdom.

Notable gains in rank for institutions from 2024 to 2025 include the University of Washington Seattle (55), jumping 12 places to 13^th currently, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (40), up 11 to now rank 24^th, and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (39), which moved 10 places and stands at 25^th. Among those seeing the largest declines in rank (by nine or more places) are four institutions based in Australia, the United States, and Mainland China.

The nations represented in this list of leading institutions, which includes government organizations, universities, and some non-universities, are the United States (26), Mainland China (8), the United Kingdom (5), Australia (4), and Hong Kong SAR, the Netherlands, and Singapore (2 each). Canada, Germany, and Switzerland each claim one institution. Belgium, France, and Israel were represented by one institution apiece last year but do not appear this year.

Highly Cited Researchers identified in the cross-field category

This is the eighth year we have sought to identify researchers with cross-field impact – those who contribute multiple Highly Cited Papers in several different fields but do not register enough in any single ESI field to qualify for selection.

It is important to distinguish cross-field selection from selection in more than one ESI field. Both classes of individuals have demonstrated significant research influence across fields. Cross-field researchers qualify for selection based on the sum of their Highly Cited Papers and citations that meets a normalized threshold equivalent to selection in any field – whereas those named in multiple fields qualify outright in each field.

Among the 3,562 researcher awards in the 21 ESI fields, 227 individuals appear in two ESI fields and 31 appear in three or more fields. Recipients of cross-field awards, of which there are 3,569, qualify in only one category or else they would have been chosen in one or more ESI fields.

Identifying innovative impact and research breadth

As we have emphasized, our method of identifying Highly Cited Researchers includes not only publication and citation counts but other considerations to direct us to scientists and social scientists who are extending knowledge in frontier areas of investigation and are having community-wide influence and impact.

One aspect of a publication profile that helps us select such leading contemporary contributors is the production of highly cited original research more than review articles. Reviews provide convenient sources of reference and, on average, are cited four or five times as often as regular articles. If disproportionately represented in a portfolio, reviews can distort a reliable reading of the sort of influence we are looking for. To generalize, original research articles are forward-looking whereas reviews are retrospective. Both are important, but we favour the first type of research publication more than the second.

Another criterion for selection is demonstration of community-wide or global influence over local or regional impact only. The citation network reveals diffusion or narrowness in the uptake of an individual’s contributions. We prioritize those with broad impact, reflected in a wide network of citing papers and research colleagues.

Upholding research integrity

Trust in research is increasingly at risk, creating additional challenges for the research community. As the need for high-quality data from rigorously selected sources is becoming ever more important, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) has had to respond to technological advances and shifts in the publishing landscape when selecting individuals for the Highly Cited Researchers program.

Just as we have applied stringent standards and transparent selection criteria to identify trusted journals in the Web of Science Core Collection, we continue to refine our evaluation and selection policies for our annual Highly Cited Researchers program to address the challenges of an increasingly complex and polluted scholarly record.

Some aspects of our evaluation are straightforward. To credit a single author among many tens or hundreds listed on a paper strains reason, so we eliminate Highly Cited Papers with more than 30 authors or with explicit group authorship as defined by publishers from our analysis. In addition, retracted papers are not considered in our evaluation and individuals formally found to have engaged in scientific misconduct by their institution, a government agency, funding agency or a publisher are not eligible for selection to this program.

Our evaluation process has evolved to include additional layers of scrutiny each year.

This year, ISI analysts removed Highly Cited Papers authored by individuals excluded from the 2024 list due to concerns around research integrity.

The removal of these papers ensures that the influence of questionable citation and publication practices do not obscure the contributions of others. It allows deserving researchers — whose work may have been previously overshadowed — to be recognized.

This procedure allowed us to reintroduce the Mathematics category. A concentration of researchers in one subarea increasingly dominated this category before it was discontinued in 2023. The publication activity in this domain and its citation network, much of it having the appearance of gaming, obscured high-quality publications by others and in other subareas. The new cohort of Highly Cited Researchers in Mathematics has a more diverse character and is populated by well-known mathematicians and statisticians, many of whom have been awarded top prizes reflecting significant peer recognition.

The second improvement focused on applying existing selection criteria more comprehensively and consistently. By reducing reliance on manual inspection and increasing algorithmic analysis, ISI introduced a more objective and scalable review of candidates. While the criteria themselves remain unchanged, their application is now more robust. Human qualitative evaluation remains an important part of our selection process.

(see Highly Cited Researchers 2025: Integrity Drives Selection)

Factors that signal potential integrity concerns include but are not limited to:

• Extreme levels of hyper-prolific authorship: We expect authors named on a paper to have made a meaningful contribution to any paper which bears their name and the publication of multiple papers per week over prolonged periods strains conventional norms for authorship and academic contribution.
• Excessive self-citation: We screen for Highly Cited Papers with extreme levels of self-citation, isolating and evaluating these outliers for each ESI field. We also look for evidence of prodigious, very recent publications that may represent research of incremental value, accompanied by high levels of author self-citation.
• Unusual collaborative citation patterns: Excessive reliance on citations from co-authors can suggest limited influence beyond a researcher’s immediate network; for example, if more than half of a researcher’s citations derive from co-authors, we consider this suggests a narrow influence, rather than the broad community recognition we seek to reflect.

ISI analysts will continue to apply additional filters to flag and investigate anomalous publication and citation patterns. As a result of recent refinements, many candidates did not pass our stringent evaluation and selection criteria. This year, approximately 2,400 individuals were excluded from selection. Although this marks a more moderate increase than in previous years, exclusions have climbed significantly over time: from 500 in 2022, to more than 1,000 in 2023, and over 2,000 in 2024. These figures are sobering, and they highlight the need for deep qualitative review alongside any quantitative assessments in analyzing the research literature. We explicitly call upon the research community to safeguard integrity through thorough enhanced peer review and adherence to other internationally recognized practices to maintain the integrity of research and its publication.