CEHS researchers among most cited scientists worldwide

April 26, 2021

Spring Library photo

Twelve researchers from the College of Education and Human Sciences at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln were listed among the top 2% of the most cited researchers worldwide throughout their careers, according to research on metascience by Stanford University.


Stanford University professor John Loannidis worked alongside U.S.-based Kevin Boyack and the Netherlands-based Jeroen Baas to release the exhaustive list of the top 100,000 scientists of various disciplines. The database, which analyzed the career-long impacts by researchers, was published publicly in mid-October 2020 in the journal PLoS Biology.


Each scientist was assigned a weight based on the number of citations of their own research publications. Separate data are shown for career-long and single year impact. CEHS researchers, in rank-order of impact are listed below:


Career-long impact:



Single-year impact:



The authors noted that just counting the number of citations does not truly measure the impact of the researcher, since some fields are more vibrant with research than others. However, they argue that their database, “allows the inclusion of more comprehensive samples of top-cited scientists for fields that have low citation densities and therefore would be less likely to be found in the top 100,000 when all scientific fields are examined together.” 


They assigned scientists ranks based on their impacts within the sub-fields of their disciplines. See the full study.

College of Education and Human Sciences
Special Education and Communication Disorders