A standardized citation metrics author database annotated for scientific field
Authors: Jeroen Baas
Richard Klavans
Kevin W Boyack
John P A Ioannidis
Journal: PLoS Biology (2019)
Discipline: BIOLOGY & BIOCHEMISTRY
Keywords: Citation metrics; top scientists; database; h-index; coauthorship-adjusted hm-index
Affiliations: Departments of Medicine, Health Research and Policy, Biomedical Data Science, and Statistics and Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America., Research Intelligence, Elsevier B.V., Amsterdam, the Netherlands., SciTech Strategies, Inc., Wayne, Pennsylvania, United States of America., SciTech Strategies, Inc., Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States of America.

Abstract:  Citation metrics are widely used and misused. We have created a publicly available database of 100,000 top scientists that provides standardized information on citations, h-index, coauthorship-adjusted hm-index, citations to papers in different authorship positions, and a composite indicator. Separate data are shown for career-long and single-year impact. Metrics with and without self-citations and ratio of citations to citing papers are given. Scientists are classified into 22 scientific fields and 176 subfields. Field- and subfield-specific percentiles are also provided for all scientists who have published at least five papers. Career-long data are updated to end of 2017 and to end of 2018 for comparison. 

Retracted: No

PubPeer comments:
 I was somewhat pleasantly surprised to see myself on the single year 2017 list. Was less pleasantly surprised to see my %self citation at over 30%. The figures were about 1200 total citations, about 800 citations excluding self citations (by all authors). Yikes, that gives 30% self citation rate. I went into Scopus to see what was going on. I am an author on two of the Autophagy guidelines. Total citations for those two papers was 895, excluding self citations from all authors, 499. The difference was 396 citations. So, of my 400  self citations , 396 were made by other authors of the guidelines, putting MY real  self citation rate at less than 1%. Live by the sword, die by the sword I suppose. , 
 In Table S4 scientists with rank (ns) 2133 and 53715 are missing. That is 2134 follows after 2132 when ordered by rank (ns) and so on. Scientists with rank 2665 and 65355 are missing. Apparently the same pair of scientists as before. Of course there are a lot more ranks missing starting after 100,000. But this, as I understand, is because the database includes top 100,000 scientists in both ranking versions: including self-citations and excluding self-citations (ns). So only those scientist with rank (ns) 100,000 are included who have rank = 100,000. This said, the ranks that I mentioned in the beginning of the comment ought to be in the database since they are less than 100,000. Names of the scientists with rank(ns) 9052, 64683, and 91010 are missing. Would like to get an explanation how it came about in order to understand how much I can trust the rest of the data. , 
 The paper supplies a database of 100,000 most cited scientists. I went through the database and discovered that it includes only 6 out of 22 Abel Prize winners. Andrew Wiles who proved Fermat theorem is prominently missing. Only 22 of 60 Fields Medal recipients are on that list. And it is not that the list has no mathematicians at all. The list has 895 mathematicians. The authors propose to use their data for research evaluations. This seems not to be a good idea. ,