South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, and Nigeria house some of world’s most highly cited researchers
The number of Africans on a list of the world’s most highly cited researchers increased by two this year to 17.
Clarivate Analytics’ 2019 Highly Cited Researchers list was released on 19 November. It names 6,000 researchers from 60 countries who are the top 1 per cent of cited authors in 21 categories plus a “cross field” category introduced in 2018, which includes researchers who are highly cited but below the threshold for individual categories.
South Africa hosts 12 of the Africa-based researchers on the list, two more than last year. Kenya is now joint second along with Egypt, with two apiece—that’s one more than Kenya had last year, and one less than Egypt had. Nigeria hosts a single researcher, unchanged from 2018.
Five of the African researchers appear in the cross-field category, three are in the plant and animal science category, and there are two each in the agricultural science, social science, and mathematics categories. There is a single Africa-based researcher in each of the psychiatry and psychology, microbiology, and environment and ecology categories.
Old and new names
Five new researchers based in South Africa appear on the list in 2019. They are: Abdon Atangana, a mathematician at the Institute of Groundwater Studies at the University of the Free State; Frederick Raal, the head of the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism at the University of the Witwatersrand; Marie-Louise Newell, former director of the Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies, and professor at the universities of the Witwatersrand and Southampton in the United Kingdom; Steven Churchill, part of the Homo Naledi team at Wits and Duke University in the United States; and Linus Opara, a systems engineer at Stellenbosch University.
The newcomers join mainstays on the list, who include well-known researchers like microbiologist Lynn Morris, Aids researcher Salim Abdool Karim, and palaeontologist Lee Berger.
In Kenya, Philip Thornton of the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya, who made the list last year, is joined by newcomer Jianchu Xu. The latter is affiliated to the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi. Gamal ElMasry, an agricultural engineer at Suez Canal University, is a new entry based in Egypt. Oye Gureje from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria retains his place in the psychiatry and psychology category.
The 2019 edition of the top-cited list is characterised by the growth of China, which adds 150 researchers and replaced the United Kingdom as the country with the second largest number of top-cited researchers. Overall, the US dominated with 44 per cent of the world’s top-cited researchers. Harvard alone houses more than 200.