Data & licence

Source & citation

The dataset is made by John P.A. Ioannidis (Stanford University) with Jeroen Baas (Elsevier) and Kevin W. Boyack (SciTech Strategies), and is often called the Stanford–Elsevier top 2% scientists list. This site is independent and not affiliated with them.

Ioannidis, John P.A. (2026), ‘August 2026 data-update for “Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators”’, Mendeley Data, v9, doi:10.17632/btchxktzyw.9 (dataset page). Version 9, built from a Scopus snapshot extracted 2026-08.

Methods: Ioannidis JPA, Boyack KW, Baas J. Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators. PLoS Biol 2020;18(10):e3000918. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3000918

Who is included

Authors are included if they rank in the top 100,000 by composite score (with or without self-citations) or in the top 2% of their main subfield. 2025 impact (the dataset's “single recent year” table) uses only citations received during 2025, to papers from any year; career impact (the “career-long” table) uses all citations 1996–2025.

How the ranking works

The composite indicator c sums six citation indicators, each log-scaled to 0–1 against the maximum across all authors: total citations (NC), h-index (H), co-authorship-adjusted hm-index (Hm), and citations to papers as single (NCS), single+first (NCSF), and single+first+last author (NCSFL). Paper counts do not count. Ranks are given with and without self-citations; the dataset is ordered by the version without self-citations, which is the default here.

Subfields follow the Science-Metrix classification (20 fields, 174 subfields); each author's subfield is the one with most of their papers.

Career length

Career impact adds up citations received from 1996 to 2025, so authors who have published for decades have had far longer to accumulate them; 2025 impact counts only citations received in 2025 and is much less tilted toward long careers. The career stage filter groups authors by year of first publication — before 1992, 1992–2001, 2002–2011, 2012 or later, the same strata the dataset authors use in their companion age-stratified database (doi:10.17632/wwykk8d48g) — and shows each author's rank within their stage.

Caveats (from the dataset FAQ)

• Not being listed only means the composite score was below the threshold — it says nothing about the quality of anyone's work. Being listed is not an endorsement either.
• Data are Scopus profiles as of the snapshot and are archival; corrections go to Scopus (Author Feedback Wizard), not to the dataset authors.
• Only one affiliation (chosen by Scopus) is shown; institution names exist for large institutions only.
• Both living and deceased scientists are included.

Years

The site has the 2025, 2024 and 2023 lists. Each year is a separate annual release of the dataset, built from a new Scopus snapshot, so an author's figures can shift between years because their Scopus profile changed, not only because of new citations.

Author profiles show the same author in the other years. The dataset has no author ID, so the site links the years by name and year of first publication. Where those differ, it falls back, in order, to: surname with first names or initials that agree (“Hofman, Albert” and “Hofman, A.”) and a first year within one; the same surname and first name in the same subfield and country when Scopus has changed the first year; the same name words in another order (“Guyatt, Gordon” and “Gordon, Guyatt H.”); and a first name spelt nearly the same (“Sies, Helmut” and “Sies, Helmult”) in the same subfield and country with a similar rank. A rule is used only when it finds exactly one author, and a link is kept only when each record is the other's match. Looser links are marked ≈ in the profile with what differs; authors who cannot be matched show as not found.

Licence

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0). Shared here for non-commercial use only.

Changes made on this site

The original Excel tables were converted to a compressed format for this site, with long decimals rounded (c-scores to 4 decimal places, hm-index to 2, ratios and shares to 3–4). Apart from the affiliation corrections and the countries filled in, both below, no values were changed. Ranks within country, institution and career stage, and the c-score part bars, are calculated by the site from the published values.

Affiliation corrections

Affiliations shown here that differ from the dataset, each labelled “corrected” wherever the author appears.

Countries filled in

The dataset gives no country for some authors. Where it gives the country most of their papers come from (“Most frequent country” in a profile), this site shows them in that country, labelled “country from papers” in their profile, so they are counted in its countries, filters and ranks within country: 147 authors in the 2025 impact list. The other 22 there have neither and are shown without a country. Earlier releases do not give that country, so their authors are left as they are.