70 institutions globally field 43% of highly cited awards

New analysis published by analytics firm Clarivate shows how high concentrations of highly cited researchers – an elite group of scientists and social scientists whose research published over the last decade has demonstrated global impact – are located in a relatively small number of top research institutions.

Sixty-five universities and five national institutes, such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences – comprising only 3.3% of research institutions – account for 43.3% of Highly Cited Research Awards (HCRs). They each fielded around 20 or more HCRs annually.

The top 21 institutions – each with a share of 0.7% or more, or around 50 or more researcher awards annually – account for 23.2% of all HCRs.

The Clarivate study, Research Powerhouses: The top 70 institutions home to Highly Cited Researchers (2021-2025), conducted by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), shows that just six institutions, each with at least a 1% share, collectively account for 12.1% of the total.

The top six include two Chinese institutions, including the top institution, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAC) (3.6%), which is followed by Harvard University (3.2%), Stanford University (1.8%), the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) (1.4%), Tsinghua University (1.1%) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1.0%).

CAC and NIH are the only government agencies in the top 70, which otherwise comprises universities and medical schools.

While the United States dominates, being home to almost 26,000, or 40%, of HCRs, Mainland China’s (China) 8,641 HCRs make up the next largest cohort at 13.6%, the study shows.

Researchers at the Berlin-based Max Planck Society had 0.9% of HCRs, and both the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Diego produced 0.8%, while scientists at Columbia University produced 0.7%.

Among the seventy universities and institutes discussed in the study, the 10 with the lowest percentage, 0.3%, are Leiden (Netherlands), Monash (Australia) and Princeton universities, the universities of British Columbia, Pittsburgh and Southern California, as well as the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of Texas Anderson Cancer Center (Houston), and Wageningen University and Research Center (Netherlands).

The rise of China

“Our interest in highly cited researchers (defined as the top 1% of cited scientific papers) is long-standing,” David Pendlebury, ISI’s head of research analysis, told University World News. “This dataset allows us to try to understand how the scientific and scholarly world is being reshaped.

He said the greatest change over the last decade in the HCR list is the rise of Mainland China, citing its ascendancy to second place among nations; the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ rise to first place among institutions; and the increasing number of top ranks captured by its universities, foremost Tsinghua University, followed by Peking, Zhejiang, Beijing Institute of Technology, Fudan, Shanghai Jiao Tong, and others.

“I think the most important takeaway is the rise of China as a country. Chinese papers, particular institutions and universities in China and individual researchers in China are more and more occupying our highly cited researcher list,” said Pendlebury.

He noted that it is also worth observing that with Tsinghua, the University of Hong Kong stands securely in the global top 20, on par with Cambridge, Columbia, and the University of Washington.

Areas of Chinese excellence

In order to reduce statistical noise, the HCR numbers are compiled using an 11-year lookback and then from an average of the past five years in the Web of Science database (formerly the Science Citation Index).

While overall, China remains behind the US (43%-14%) in a number of specific areas, Chinese scientists produce more HCR than do American researchers.

One area is chemistry, where Chinese scientists produced 34.6% (or 901) highly cited papers, while Americans produced 30% (794 highly cited papers), and German scientists produced the next largest number of highly cited papers, 5.8%.

The gap between the two superpowers is even larger in computer science, where the Chinese produced 26.7% of HCR and the Americans 21.2%, with the United Kingdom being next at 8.7%.

Chinese scientists more than doubled the output of Americans in engineering, producing 30.8% (552) of HCRs compared to the American figure of 14.6% (or 262 highly cited papers). Australian scientists were next, producing 123 or 6.9% of highly cited papers.

Chinese scientists produced more than 30% more highly cited papers in materials science than did their American counterparts: 39.4% to 29.3%. Scientists in Singapore were the next most prolific group, producing 5.1% of HCR in this category.

Where the US leads

Fields in which American scientists produced the most HCR while the Chinese produced the second largest number are agricultural sciences – 20.8% to China’s 13.7%; geosciences, in which American scientists produced 36.6% of highly cited papers while the Chinese produced 15.6%; and mathematics, in which Americans produced 24.6% compared to the Chinese figure of 15.9%. American physicists produced more than five times the number of HCR papers than did their Chinese counterparts: 53.4% to 10.2%.

In three fields, scientists from the United Kingdom produced the second greatest number of high-impact papers after the Americans.

In biology and biochemistry, American scientists produced 58.8% of HCR papers, while their British colleagues produced 11.3% (German scientists were next, producing 7.2%).

In clinical medicine, American researchers produced 2,359 (or just under 50%) of highly cited papers while British researchers produced 8.6% (411); German scientists were again the third most prolific, producing 6.8% of highly cited papers in this field.

American researchers in economics and business accounted for 62% of papers, while British researchers wrote 4.3% (and German researchers 4.1%).

Almost 33% of HCR papers in environment and ecology were written by American scientists, while British scientists produced 10%; at 8.7%, Australian scientists were the next most prolific.

Americans produced more than 10 times the number of HCR papers in microbiology than did British scientists: 59% to 5.8%. The gap between the Americans and the next cadre, the British, in regard to molecular biology and genetics was almost 40 percentage points: 61.2% to 13%.

In neuroscience, the two groups of scientists who produced the most HCR were also the Americans, at 58.8%, and the British, at 12.6%. American scientists produced 36.7% of highly cited papers in pharmacology and toxicology, followed by British scientists, who produced 19%.

Japan produced the second largest number of highly cited papers in immunology, while American scientists produced 54.6%.

Tunisian, Nepalese, and Bulgarian scientists, and scientists from the Republic of Georgia, are among those who produced one HRC. Indonesian and Peruvian scientists produced two. Ukrainian scientists produced seven.

British scientists in third place

ISI’s data shows that British scientists produced the third largest number of HCRs: 5,335.

The next five nations, interestingly enough, are not in population order. Germany, with a population of 83.7 million, produced 3,329 highly cited papers.

Australia has a population of 27 million but produced the next largest number of highly cited papers: 2,766. Canada has a population of 40 million and produced 1,904 such papers, while the number of papers from the Netherlands, which has a population of 18 million, is 1,805.

One of the most interesting findings in the study is that when normalised by the researcher population, a number of smaller European countries “punch above their weight”.

“What we see is that countries like Switzerland,” said Dmytro Filchenko, ISI’s senior director for research and analytics, “are performing extremely well in terms of this kind of concentration of highly cited researchers, per population or per capita performance.

“Even compared to last year's analysis, Switzerland moved from fifth to eighth position in terms of concentration, and also Denmark, quite a small European country, entered the top 10; it was 11 a year ago. This is quite a significant improvement in just one year,” he said.

US chaos as yet unreflected

The American National Institutes of Health (NIH) alone accounted for 1.4% of HCR papers, which, given the massive cuts and the firing of thousands of researchers, appears as a surprise.

However, as Pendlebury explained, the ISI report is a lagging report, and the 2025 in the title does not refer to figures from 2025 but, rather, to the end date of the five-year average.

In other words, the data in this report does not include data from the calendar year 2025 and, thus, the period after President Donald J Trump returned to the Oval Office in January 2025, or any data relating to the cuts overseen at the NIH by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr or Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Pendlebury further explained ISI could not answer as to the effect of the Trump administration’s cuts and other disorder in the scientific ecosphere because of the lag between when a paper destined to become a highly cited paper is published (or distributed) and when it shows up in their data.

“Papers are in production for a long time before they appear. And then citations [of these papers] themselves are also lagging. I don’t think that we will know about these systemic changes in organisation and funding for several years.”

Global trajectory

While discussing this, Pendlebury made an important point about the trajectory of papers.

“If a paper is cited at some high frequency early on, it tends to continue that trajectory. So early citations tend to foreshadow total cumulative citations,” he said.

However, as we discussed vis-à-vis Einstein’s papers from his annus mirabilis, 1905, when he published three path-breaking papers (including the one that defined E=mc²), when something becomes so well known, like the theory of evolution, there is no need to cite it.

Pendlebury illustrated the phenomenon by reference to the late sociologist of science, Robert Merton, who coined the phrase “obliteration by incorporation”.

In his analysis Pendlebury explained that the figures for the top 70 institutions show how concentrated research capacity can shape global scholarship.

“Large, well-funded and stable institutions play a central role: they offer the environment, resources and networks that help talented researchers thrive. In turn, the achievements of Highly Cited Researchers strengthen institutional reputation and attract further expertise.”

He said with success comes responsibility because longstanding public support has enabled the development of research powerhouses that generate substantial societal benefit.

“Significant shifts in organisational structure or funding models must be considered carefully, as they may disrupt systems that have produced decades of scientific advancement,” Pendlebury said.