Privacy

In short

This site uses no cookies, shows no advertising and does not follow you around the web. It counts visits with Statcounter, set up so that it stores nothing on your device and keeps only shortened IP addresses. Nothing is sold or shared for marketing.

Visitor statistics

To see which pages are read and how people find the site, each page view is counted by Statcounter, which records:

• the date and time of the visit
• the page viewed, and the page you came from (for example a search engine)
• your browser, operating system, device type and screen size
• your IP address, shortened before it is stored (203.0.113.123 is kept as 203.0.113.??), from which Statcounter estimates the country and region

Statcounter is set not to use cookies or any other storage on your device, so it keeps no identifier for you in your browser. We look at the statistics only as totals, to improve the site; the legal basis is our legitimate interest in knowing how it is used (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). Statcounter processes the data for us under its own privacy policy.

Hosting

The site is hosted by HostGator and delivered through Cloudflare, which protects it from attacks and makes it load faster. As with any website, their servers receive your IP address and the address of each page or file your browser asks for, and keep them in server logs, to deliver the site and keep it secure. Cloudflare may set a short-lived security cookie, only if it needs to check that a visitor is not an automated program.

Everything else a page needs, including its fonts and data files, comes from this site itself: apart from Statcounter, your browser contacts no other service while you read. The share buttons (X, LinkedIn, Bluesky) are plain links that send nothing until you click one, and links to other sites, such as nobelprize.org, lead to sites with their own privacy policies.

Contact form

If you write to us through the contact form, we receive your name, email address, topic and message by email, with the IP address it was sent from, which helps us recognise spam; to limit spam, the server also counts the messages from each address for an hour. We use your details only to reply, keep the email only as long as the conversation needs it, and never add you to a mailing list.

Scientists listed on this site

The rankings come from the dataset published by Ioannidis and colleagues with Elsevier, built from Scopus author profiles and released under a Creative Commons licence (see Data & licence). For each listed author it gives a name, current affiliation and country, field and citation figures, which this site shows as published to make them searchable; the legal basis is the legitimate and public interest in open research metrics (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). Nobel Prizes come from nobelprize.org. We can correct a wrong current affiliation; other errors in a record are fixed in Scopus and show in the next yearly release (see the contact page).

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask what data we hold about you, have it corrected or deleted, object to its use, and complain to your data protection authority. As we keep no visitor profile and only shortened IP addresses, we can usually not link visit statistics to a person. To use any of these rights, write to us through the contact form.

Who runs this site

Top-Cited Scientists is an independent site, not affiliated with Stanford University or Elsevier. You can reach us through the contact form.