A Scientific Elite: HCRs with Staying Power

A Scientific Elite: Highly Cited Researchers with Staying Power, 2014-2024

Discover the 405 Highly Cited Researchers who have consistently shaped global research from 2014 to 2024 – an elite group recognized annually by Clarivate for their enduring research impact and citation excellence.

Each year the release of the Highly Cited Researchers list from Clarivate attracts significant global media attention and instills pride in the selected individuals and their home institutions. Comprising around 7,000 scientists and social scientists – roughly one in a thousand researchers worldwide – this group represents a distinct class of influential figures in the research community.

The Institute for Scientific Information draws on our deep expertise and wealth of trusted data to create this list. Our analysis uses an 11-year moving window to track and analyze Highly Cited Papers – those in the top 1% by citations for field and year. This method strikes a balance between stability and dynamism, as approximately one-third of the list is refreshed annually. As intended, this allows researchers at all career stages to enter and exit the list over time.

We recently analyzed the individuals who have been named to the Highly Cited Researchers list every year from 2014 – when the current methodology for identifying top-performing papers was introduced – through 2024. The analysis identified 405 researchers who clearly represent both a scientific and statistical elite.

The persistent 405: Global and institutional insights

We took a closer look to find out more about these 405 Highly Cited Researchers with remarkable publication and citation staying power, whose research has had a consistent and enduring influence on their fields.

First, they are predominately based at U.S. institutions (241) and Europe (113). Table 1 lists the countries/regions of researchers who have been chosen every year from 2014-2024.

Table 1: Countries/regions where the 405 Highly Cited Researchers named every year 2014-2024 are based.

Country/Region	Number of Researchers	Share of Total
United States	241	59.5%
United Kingdom	33	8.1%
Germany	26	6.4%
Netherlands	13	3.2%
Australia	12	3.0%
Japan	12	3.0%
Switzerland	10	2.5%
Canada	9	2.2%
Mainland China	8	2.0%
France	6	1.5%
Spain	6	1.5%
Austria	4	1.0%
Belgium	4	1.0%
Italy	4	1.0%
South Korea	4	1.0%
Denmark	2	1.0%
Ireland	2	0.5%
New Zealand	2	0.5%
Chile	1	0.2%
Czech Republic	1	0.2%
Finland	1	0.2%
Hong Kong	1	0.2%
Saudi Arabia	1	0.2%
Singapore	1	0.2%
Sweden	1	0.2%

The number of Highly Cited Researchers from Mainland China has been rapidly growing over this 11-year period but began with a relative low base compared to the United States. In 2014, 52.9% of all Highly Cited Researchers were from the U.S. and just 3.8% from Mainland China, while by 2024 the United States’ share of Highly Cited Researchers was 36.4% and Mainland China’s had grown to 20.4%.

Table 2 lists the top 40 institutions associated with these 405 researchers. Whereas the national tallies derive from the 2024 affiliations, the institutional affiliation counts reflect the specific locations identified by each researcher over each year – thus totaling more than the number of researchers. Because some researchers changed their affiliations and locations during this period, this analysis provides more granularity.

Table 2: Annual stated affiliations of consistent Highly Cited Researchers 2014-2024. The counts are based on 4,455 stated primary affiliations (over 11 years by 405 researchers).

Rank	Institution	Annual Stated Affiliations
1	Harvard University	266
2	U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)	122
3	Max Planck Society	119
4	Stanford University	110
5	University of California Santa Cruz	99
6	University of California San Diego	87
7	Cornell University	82
8	Brigham & Women’s Hospital	77
9	Broad Institute	61
10	Northwestern University	58
11	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	57
11	University of Cambridge	57
13	Mayo Clinic	55
14	Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center	54
15	Yale University	53
16	Howard Hughes Medical Institute	51
16	University of California Berkeley	51
18	Washington University of St Louis	50
19	Icahn School of Medicine at Mt Sinai	49
20	Columbia University	48
21	University of California San Francisco	45
22	Dana Farber Cancer Institute	41
23	University of Melbourne	40
24	Scripps Research	39
24	University of California Los Angeles	39
26	Duke University	38
26	RIKEN	38
28	Utrecht University	37
29	Massachusetts General Hospital	34
30	Erasmus University	33
30	Rice University	33
30	Rockefeller University	33
30	University of California Riverside	33
30	University of Colorado Boulder	33
35	University College London	29
36	ETH Zurich	28
36	University of Texas Austin	28
36	University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center	28
36	Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute	28
40	University of Pennsylvania	27

The ranking treats campuses of university systems separately, such as those for the California, Texas, and London systems. If considered collectively, the University of California system would rank first, with 354 annual stated affiliations from 2014-2024. Conversely, we report the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as the Max Planck Society institutes as single entities, as we have done in our annual Highly Cited Researchers analyses.

About one-sixth of the 405 Highly Cited Researchers (66, or 16%) changed their affiliations over the surveyed period, indicating that a large majority (339, or 84%), remained at their original research locations throughout the period. Among the 241 U.S. researchers, only 34 (14%) switched locations, while in Germany and the U.K., 6 of 26 (23%) and 7 of 33 (21%) changed their affiliations, respectively.

Crossing fields: Interdisciplinary impact and career evolution

Selected researchers may be recognized in one or more Essential Science Indicators fields or in the Cross-Field category introduced in 2018. Those qualifying in the Cross-Field category produce Highly Cited Papers across disciplines that have the equivalent publication and citation impact to those selected in a specific field.

We examined the historical record of selection by field for these 405 researchers and the analysis reveals that 255 (63%) were chosen in the same research field across years while 150 (37%) qualified in a different field or moved into the Cross-Field category.

Among the countries or regions with more than 10 (out of those 405) researchers there were some interesting differences, perhaps hinting at the nature of their research systems and the importance of interdisciplinarity. In the U.K.,15 of 33 researchers were selected in a new field during the period surveyed, which at 46% is a little higher rate than observed for the United States (36%), Germany (39%), Australia (42%), and Switzerland (40%). In contrast, in Japan only 3 of 12 (25%) and in The Netherlands only 2 of 13 (15%) were selected in a field different from the one in which they were chosen initially.

Sir Richard H. Friend provides a fascinating example of a researcher selected in multiple fields over time. In 2014 and 2015, he was chosen in Materials Science, in 2016 and 2017 in Physics, in 2018 in the new Cross-Field category, then in 2019 again in Materials Science, in Chemistry in 2020 and 2021, and finally in Materials Science in 2022, 2023, and 2024. His research interests include polymer science, molecular semiconductors, and nanotechnology, among other areas, which explains the diversity of his Highly Cited Papers that span several areas. Formerly Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge, Friend is now Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore.

From citations to Nobel Prizes: Recognizing research leadership

As may be expected, there are Nobel Laureates among the 405:

David W. C. MacMillan (Princeton University, Chemistry, 2021)
Brian K. Kobilka (Stanford University, Chemistry, 2012)
Andre Geim (University of Manchester, Physics, 2010)
Daron Acemoglu (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Economics, 2024)

Among the 405 individuals, around two dozen have been recognized by Clarivate as Citation Laureates – researchers identified as potential Nobel Laureates – including Geim and Acemoglu, who, as forecasted, later received the Nobel Prize.

Our annual listing of Highly Cited Researchers is a one-time reading, a snapshot of a moment, but the analysis of multiple years of Highly Cited Researcher data provides an animation allowing greater insights into multidimensional dynamics of research output, impact, and peer recognition.

View our interactive visualization to further analyze broader trends in the Highly Cited Researchers 2014-2024.

Highly Cited Researchers Institute for Scientific Information