Which of the worlds institutions employ the most highly cited researchers? An analysis of the data from highlycited.com

A few weeks ago, Thomson Reuters published a list of the highly cited researchers worldwide (highlycited.com). Since the data is freely available for downloading and includes the names of the researchers’ institutions, we produced a ranking of the institutions on the basis of the number of highly cited researchers per institution. This ranking is intended to be a helpful amendment of other available institutional rankings.

💡 Research Summary

The paper exploits the publicly available “Highly Cited Researchers” (HCR) list released by Thomson Reuters in 2014 to construct a novel institutional ranking based on the sheer number of researchers whose work falls in the top‑1 % of citations within their respective fields. The authors begin by downloading the complete dataset, which contains more than 3,000 individual researchers across 21 scientific and technical disciplines, each entry specifying the researcher’s primary affiliation(s). Because institutional names appear in a variety of formats, a thorough data‑cleaning step is performed: duplicate spellings, abbreviations, and language variations are reconciled into a standardized set of institution identifiers.

Two counting schemes are then applied. The first, a “raw count,” tallies each researcher once under their principal affiliation, ignoring any secondary appointments. The second, a “weighted count,” assigns a fractional credit of 0.5 to each affiliation for researchers with multiple institutional ties, thereby acknowledging the collaborative nature of modern science while avoiding double‑counting. Both metrics are used to generate a ranked list of institutions worldwide.

The results confirm the dominance of U.S. research universities: Harvard leads the weighted list with over 150 highly cited scholars, followed closely by Stanford, MIT, and the University of California system. In the United Kingdom, Oxford and Cambridge occupy the top slots, while Germany’s Max Planck Institutes, Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, and the Netherlands’ University of Amsterdam also rank highly. Notably, several large technology corporations—Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Apple—appear among the top 30 institutions, each hosting between 30 and 50 highly cited researchers. This highlights the growing importance of industry labs as centers of scientific influence, a dimension often omitted from traditional university‑centric rankings.

The authors discuss methodological limitations. Citation‑based selection inherently favors fields with high citation density (e.g., biomedical sciences) and may under‑represent disciplines such as mathematics or engineering where citation practices differ. The arbitrary 0.5 weighting for multiple affiliations is acknowledged as a simplification that does not capture the true contribution share of each institution. To address these concerns, the paper proposes future work that integrates additional performance indicators—research funding, patent activity, and international collaboration metrics—into a composite index, and that tracks longitudinal changes to capture dynamic shifts in institutional research strength.

In conclusion, the study demonstrates that an HCR‑derived ranking provides a complementary perspective to existing university rankings (e.g., QS, Times Higher Education) by directly measuring research impact through citation excellence. The findings are valuable for university administrators seeking to benchmark scholarly influence, for policymakers allocating research funding, and for corporate talent‑acquisition teams aiming to identify high‑impact research environments. By exposing both the concentration of elite scholars in traditional academic powerhouses and the rising prominence of industry research centers, the paper offers actionable insights for strategic planning across the global research ecosystem.