From CNN Money, of all places, comes a list of the most highly cited authors in Geosciences, courtesy of Thomson Scientific.
Top Ten Highly Cited Authors in Geosciences, 1996-2007
Name Institution Department/Specialty Total Number of Citations Frank C. Hawthorne University of Manitoba Crystallography/Mineralogy 2,204 Roger Powell University of Melbourne (Australia) Metamorphic Geology Charles W. Carlson University of California, Berkeley Space Physics 1,822 Timothy J.B. Holland University of Cambridge Petrology 1,592 Andre Balogh Imperial College London Space Physics 1,568 H. John B. Birks University of Bergen (Norway) Ecology/Palaeoecology 1,548 Peter C. Burns University of Notre Dame Mineralogy 1,414 Henri Reme CNRS, CESR, Toulouse (France) Space Science 1,335 Joel D. Grice Canadian Museum of Nature Mineralogy 1,330 Juhn G. Liou Stanford University Geology/Environmental 1,327
One thousand citations over a ten-year period means that, on average, two papers which cite these guys’ work come out every week. Whatever your misgivings about the way citations are used as a metric for academic performance, that’s pretty impressive, and for me, intimidating: within a month, everyone on this list has pretty much matched my entire career thus far. Ulp.
I was interested to note that fully 50% of these citation supermen are mineralogists and petrologists – the hardest of hard rock geologists. Clearly I picked the wrong subdiscipline (although in fact, I missed a lot of hard rock stuff while I was still flirting with Physics as an undergrad, so it wasn’t really a choice). Is there something about that particular field which makes it easier, relatively, to garner citations? Shorter, more self-contained projects, perhaps; or lots of big collaborations; or a field dominated with a few big guns or labs, with fingers in lots of crystallographic pies. It can’t be just that all the smartest and/or most productive geoscientists become petrologists…
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