An updated list of the world's 100,000 most impacting researchers in science is the main outcome of a study recently published in the journal PLOS biology. Based on almost 8 million authors active in one or more fields of scientific research, the 100,000 top scientists list comprises also nine researchers from the Department of Geosciences, working in various fields such as geomorphology, geochemistry and geophysics.

According to the list (available at this link), the nine researchers are: Gilberto Artioli, Filippo Catani, Andrea D’Alpaos, Giulio Di Toro*, Manuele Faccenda, Lara Maritan, Fabrizio Nestola, Paolo Nimis and Nicola Surian. In particular, the researchers fall within the ranking referring to the year 2019, which takes into account the data of the citations received from all their papers in this specific year. Among them, Gilberto Artioli also appears in the ranking relating to the entire career, which is based on the citations received from his works between 1996 and 2019.

The study, led by Stanford University and originally published in 2019, was updated at the end of 2020 by integrating the data available up to the end of the previous year. More specifically, the work focuses on the so-called citation metrics, that is, the set of information related to the number of citations obtained from a paper. The data comes from the Scopus database and includes six metrics, ranging from the total number of citations to that referring only to papers as first or single authors, up to the h-index. In addition, particular attention is paid to self-citations, which are appropriately recognized and counted separately, in order to highlight their impact on the metrics themselves.

*Update (29 January 2021): Giulio Di Toro was not inserted initially since in the Scopus database he is indicated with a different affiliation