The article in PLOS Biology presents a list of the 2% of scientists worldwide that lead different disciplines.

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The UB is the university institution in Spain to have more researchers to outstand in an article published in PLOS Biology, which presents a list of the 2% of scientists worldwide that lead different disciplines. This ranking has been conducted with the information provided by the Scopus database.

Specifically, according to the article, there are 140 researchers of the University of Barcelona, followed by 78 from the Complutense University of Madrid and 70 from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Distinguished researchers of the UB belong to more than 50 disciplines from different fields of knowledge, ranging from health and life sciences to human sciences, through experimental sciences such as physics and chemistry, engineering, and social sciences such as economy.

The article in PLOS Biology, “Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators”, lists around 160,000 researchers within the top 2% worldwide. To do so, it uses indicators such as citations or the h-index (which quantifies scientific performance and impact), among others. These 160,000 scientists are distributed around 149 countries, the leading one being the United States, with a43% of its total, while Spain would have 1.4% of researchers (2,290 researchers, 1,287 of them affiliated at public universities).

Moreover, 661 of the most-cited researchers are in Catalan institutions, and 369 of these are linked to public universities. The study assigns the registrations based on the last article each researcher has collected in the Scopus database for the analysed period, which can affect the results in cases of researchers with more than one registration.