UC San Diego has 71 of the most widely-cited researchers in science, medicine, engineering and economics, ranking the school seventh globally, ahead of such famed universities as Oxford and Yale, according to Clarivate, a London firm that evaluates the impact of research.
Clarivate’s 2023 review also shows there are an additional 36 highly-cited researchers in San Diego spread throughout Scripps Research, the Salk Institute, La Jolla Institute for Immunology, the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, the J. Craig Venter Institute and San Diego State University.
Worldwide, Clarivate identified 7,125 highly-cited researchers across the globe. The U.S. led the way with 2,669 of the scholars, followed by China (1,275) and the United Kingdom (574). They work in fields ranging from agricultural science to clinical medicine to economics and psychiatry.
The company said that the scholars it selected had written many highly-cited papers that ranked in the top 1 percent in their respective fields over the past decade.
Many of the highly-cited researchers it mentions in San Diego are well-known stars in science, including UCSD’s Rob Knight, an expert on how the human microbiome can affect a person’s health and longevity. Knight also flourished during the pandemic, creating a way for UCSD to quickly identify hot spots for COVID-19 infections on campus.
Two other researchers, Razelle Kurzrock and Justine Debelius, were chosen for their expertise in differing areas of cancer.
UCSD is a short distance from Scripps Research, which has 13 highly-cited researchers in Clarivate’s analysis.
They include Dennis Burton and Ian Wilson, who produced groundbreaking papers on the nature and spread of the coronavirus. Another Scripps scientist, Ardem Patapoutian, shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for helping to discover cell receptors that enable people to sense heat, cold, pain, touch and sound.
Scripps is located next to the Salk Institute, whose highly-cited researchers include plant scientist Joseph Ecker, a key part of a team that’s developing ways to get plants to capture and store larger amounts of atmospheric carbon, which would be useful in fighting global warming.
