Sixteen UC Santa Barbara researchers have been named among the most influential scientists in the world, according to the 2018 Highly Cited Researchers List released by Clarivative Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters).

The annual list recognizes researchers in the sciences and social sciences from around the world whose work has had major impact in their fields. The list includes scientists whose research ranked in the top 1 percent by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science.

The highly cited UC Santa Barbara researchers for 2018 are:

Leon Balents, Physics

Guillermo C. Bazan, Materials

Steven D. Gaines, Environment/Ecology

Benjamin Halpern, Environment/Ecology

Craig Hawker, Chemistry, and also Materials

Alan Heeger, Chemistry, and also Materials

D.A. Howell, Physics

Anderson Janotti, Materials

Carrie V. Kappel, Environment/Ecology

Kevin D. Lafferty, Environment/Ecology

Thuc-Quyen Nguyen, Materials

Joshua Schimel, Environment/Ecology

Jonathan W. Schooler, Psychological & Brain Sciences

Sangwon Suh, Environment/Ecology

David Tilman, Environment/Ecology

Chris G. Van de Walle, Physics

The 2018 list contains about 4,000 highly cited researchers in 21 fields of the sciences and social sciences and approximately 2,000 highly cited researchers identified as having exceptional performance across several fields.

The list focuses on contemporary research achievement: only highly-cited papers in science and social sciences journals indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection during the period 2006-2012 were surveyed.

The methodology that determines the who’s who of high-impact researchers draws on the data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts from the Institute of Scientific Information at Clarivate Analytics. It uses Essential Science Indicators, a unique compilation of science performance metrics and trend data based on scholarly paper publication counts and citation data from the Web of Science, the premier web-based environment of scientific and scholarly research literature totaling over 33,000 journals.