José António Teixeira and António Vicente on the “Highly Cited Researchers 2020” list.

José António Teixeira and António Vicente, from the Centre of Biological Engineering (CEB) of the School of Engineering of the University of Minho, are among the most cited scientists in the world by other researchers. The confirmation is given by the Highly Cited Researchers 2020 list, by US-based Clarivate Analytics, which includes 6167 scientists from more than 60 countries, ten of them in Portugal, one less than in 2019 and four less than in 2018. The ranking focuses on the 2009-2019 period and only on the highly cited articles, which represent 1% of what is published in the world and for 21 areas of knowledge.

This is the third consecutive year that the duo of EEUM appears in the area of agricultural sciences on the list. The scenario highlights the strategy of this institution in research, namely the CEB, which has increased its visibility and has been the national R&D centre with more scientists in that ranking. For example, José António Teixeira has had his articles cited 17,784 times and is a reference in industrial biotechnology and food biotechnology, having received several awards. António Vicente has had his articles cited 10,892 times and is linked to innovations such as eco-packaging, functional and bioactive compounds and nano-systems for food applications.

The bibliometric analyses of the list were carried out by the Institute for Scientific Information of the Web of Science group, which “weighed” the scientific articles of the same annual cohort, taking advantage of the citation of older articles compared to the more recent ones. The countries most represented in the ranking are the USA (2651 scientists), China (770), UK (513), Germany (345) and Australia (305). Portugal ranks 16th in Europe and 31st in the world. The list includes 26 Nobel Prizes and Harvard University (USA) leads in the volume of scientists (188).

Quotations are one of the most widely used criteria to produce rankings of higher education institutions and demonstrate the significant influence of a group of researchers among their peers.