Donald Ingber, Sangeeta Bhatia, Jim Collins, George Church, David Mooney, Samir Mitragotri, David Weitz and George Whitesides among the highest cited researchers in ‘Web of Science’
By Benjamin Boettner
The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering with its world-leading faculty members and unique model and organization aspires to develop disruptive technologies across a range of disciplines, including tissue and organ engineering, the discovery and development of novel therapeutics and diagnostics, synthetic biology, robotics and materials sciences. Importantly, to do this, it set out to cross barriers between those disciplines to enable the creation of integrated and fundamentally new approaches.
The impact that the Wyss Institute is generating in many areas is reflected in this year’s naming of eight of its faculty as being among the most highly cited researchers during the ten-year period from 2006 to 2016. Emphasizing the success of its model, Founding Director Donald Ingber, Core Faculty members James Collins, David Mooney and David Weitz, and Associate Faculty member Sangeeta Bhatia are among the 1% of most cited researchers in the new Cross-Field category designated by Clarivate Analytics, which maintains the well-known Web of Science citation indexing service. In addition, Core Faculty members George Church, Samir Mitragotri, George Whitesides and, again, James Collins were among the 1% of most cited researchers in their respective fields.
Since 2014, Clarivate Analytics has been pinpointing individual researchers with outsized influence in their fields, based on the frequency with which their work is cited in the scientific literature. Tracing citations of publications can help reveal which ones impact a given field most. It also creates a ranking that identifies scientists with exceptional research performances.
In their new Cross-Field category, Clarivate added the possibility to identify highly cited researchers whose publications span different disciplines and scientific fields, instead of only analyzing citations for individual fields, isolated from one another. Five of the eight Wyss faculty thus were recognized as leaders-by-citation in their respective multi-disciplinary areas, with each of them consistently having published multiple high-ranking papers on research spanning different disciplines.
“This analysis impressively attests to the success of the Wyss Institute’s collaborative and multi-disciplinary environment, and shows how it nurtures outstanding researchers with diverse interests to span disciplines in innovative ways in order to bring its goals to life,” said the Wyss’ Founding Director Donald Ingber, one of the Institute’s highly cited researchers.