Warming planet, hot research
February 2010
Science Watch examines highly cited research on climate change.
The 2009 United Nations Summit on Climate Change attracted more than 100 world leaders including the heads of state of both the United States and China. This reflected the growing international concern over human impact on climate, and over the political and economic implications of climate change.
Science Watch has examined highly cited research on climate change over the last decade, using a special extraction of Thomson Reuters-indexed literature published and cited between 1999 and the spring of 2009. This search produced over 28,000 papers, from which Science Watch identified the most-cited institutions, authors, papers and journals.
The most-cited paper in the survey is a 2002 Nature report, "Ecological responses to recent climate change," (G.R. Walther, et al., 416: 389-95, 2002), now cited approximately 1,100 times. Nature and Science post comparable citation tallies for their climate-themed papers, while Global Change Biology earns top citation honors among specialty journals devoted to climate change and related topics.
The survey's most-cited author (and also the contributor to the highest number of papers in this climate-change dataset, with 57) is F. Stuart (Terry) Chapin of the University of Alaska. His top paper, with more than 800 citations, is from Science: "Biodiversity: Global biodiversity scenarios for the year 2100," (O.E. Sala, et al., 287: 1770-4, 2000).
The National Center for Atmospheric Research, based in Boulder, Colorado, registers the highest citation total: more than 11,000 collective cites to over 360 papers, the most cited of which is a Science paper on climate change and its impact on coral reefs.
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Warming planet, hot research: read the full report
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