November 23, 2020

Six UOW academics on Highly Cited Researchers 2020 list

‘Who’s who’ of international researchers ranks top 1% of scientists by citations for their field and year

Six of the University of Wollongong’s (UOW) top academics have been named on the annual Highly Cited Researchers 2020 list from Clarivate.

The list identifies researchers who demonstrated significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. Their names are drawn from the publications that rank in the top 1 per cent by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science citation index.

All six of the UOW researchers on the list are from the Australian Institute for Innovative Materials (AIIM). 

Five of the researchers – Distinguished Professor Shi Xue Dou, Distinguished Professor Hua Kun Liu, Distinguished Professor Zaiping Guo, Distinguished Professor Yoshio Bando and Professor Shulei Chou – are from the Institute for Superconducting and Electronic Materials (ISEM) in AIIM. All five also appeared on last year’s Highly Cited Researchers list. Professor Guo is also a member of UOW’s School of Mechanical, Materials, Mechatronic and Biomedical Engineering within the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences.

The sixth highly cited researcher, Professor Jun Chen (pictured above), is from the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute (IPRI), another research centre within AIIM. He also appeared on the Highly Cited Researchers List in 2018.

UOW Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation) Professor Jennifer Martin AC commended the researchers for their exceptional work.

“Congratulations to all of UOW’s Highly Cited Researchers for this recognition of their outstanding impact. We are proud and delighted to have such an impressive number of influential researchers at the University,” Professor Martin said.

“This result is further confirmation that AIIM is an absolute world leader in its field.”

Located on UOW’s Innovation Campus, AIIM takes a multi-disciplinary approach to research, bringing together biologists, clinicians, chemists, physicists, engineers and materials scientists. It was one of the first research facilities in Australia equipped to undertake ground-breaking research and also to develop the production processes, devices and prototypes that enable those research breakthroughs to be scaled-up for commercial application.

ISEM is a world-class research centre in superconducting and electronic materials science and technology. Its researchers are advancing developments in technologies including batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage; applied superconductivity for electrical and medical devices; energy conversion and transmission; spintronic and electronic materials for applications; terahertz science; and nano-structured materials.

Internationally recognised as a leader in electromaterials research, IPRI competencies lie in the design and synthesis of intelligent materials. IPRI is renowned for expertise in the group of multifunctional, stimuli-responsive materials – organic conducting polymers and carbons; used in diverse applications of energy and health.

The methodology that determines Clarivate’s “who’s who” of influential researchers draws on the data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts and data scientists at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate. It also uses the tallies to identify the countries and research institutions where these scientific elite are based.

Institute for Scientific Information Senior Citation Analyst David Pendlebury said: “In the race for knowledge, it is human capital that is fundamental and this list identifies and celebrates exceptional individual researchers at the University of Wollongong who are having a great impact on the research community as measured by the rate at which their work is being cited by others.”

The full 2020 Highly Cited Researchers list and executive summary can be found online here