The University of Minho has two scientists among the most cited in the world by other researchers – José António Teixeira, from the Center for Biological Engineering (CEB), and Rui L. Reis, from the 3B’s Group.

This was confirmed today by the Highly Cited Researchers 2024 list, by US consultancy Clarivate Analytics, which includes 6,636 scientists from 59 countries, 18 of them in Portugal. The ranking focuses on the last ten years and only on highly cited articles, which represent 1% of what is published in the world and for 21 areas of knowledge.

José António Teixeira, a full professor at UMinho’s School of Engineering, appears on this list for the seventh year running, in the cross-field area. He is a unique name in industrial biotechnology and food biotechnology, with several distinctions and 39,413 citations of his articles.

Rui L. Reis appears for the third year in the cross-field area, with 71,272 citations to his articles. The president of the I3Bs Institute and head of the associated laboratory ICVS/3B’s is a reference in biomaterials, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, with several awards and international positions.

The Highly Cited Researchers 2024 also includes two other UMinho alumni in agricultural/cross-field sciences: Isabel Ferreira and Manuel Simões.

The bibliometric analysis of the list was carried out by the Web of Science group’s Institute for Scientific Information, which “weighted” scientific articles from the same annual cohort, removing the citation advantage of older articles over more recent ones. The countries most represented in the ranking are the USA (2507 scientists, 36% of the total), China (1405), the United Kingdom (563), Germany (332) and Australia (313). Portugal moves up to 24th place in the world (from 27th) and retains 13th place in Europe, ahead of countries like Norway, whose economic size is almost twice that of Portugal.

The list includes several Nobel Prizes and the institution with the largest number of scientists is the Chinese Academy of Sciences (308), followed by Harvard University (231) and Stanford University (133). Citations are one of the criteria most commonly used to produce rankings of higher education institutions and demonstrate the significant influence of a group of researchers among their peers.

A month ago, the Elsevier publishing group’s World’s Top 2% Scientists 2024 list was also published, with 35 scientists from the School of Engineering (among 66 from UMinho) among the 200,000 most influential scientists in the world.