"ISI Highly Cited" is a database of "highly cited researchers"—scientific researchers whose publications are most often cited in academic journals over the past decade, published by the Institute for Scientific Information. Inclusion in this list is taken as a measure of the esteem of these academics and is used, for example, by the Academic Ranking of World Universities. It was founded under ISI and as of 2018 continues under the same name at Clarivate.
The methodology for inclusion is to consider papers in the upper first percentile based on citation counts of all articles indexed in the Scientific Citation Databases and published in a single, fixed year. Papers in the upper first percentile with respect of their year of publication are called highly cited papers. Each paper in the data is assigned to one or more of 21 categories, based on the ISI classification of the journal in which the article was published. The Highly Cited Researchers list is compiled by selecting, in every field, those researchers with the highest number of highly cited papers in a 10-year, rolling time period. The number of highly cited researchers varies from field to field and is determined accordingly to the total number of researchers contributing to the single field.
The categories are as follows:
- Agricultural Sciences
- Biology & Biochemistry
- Chemistry
- Clinical Medicine
- Computer Science
- Ecology/Environment
- Economics/Business
- Engineering
- Geosciences
- Immunology
- Materials Science
- Mathematics
- Microbiology
- Molecular Biology & Genetics
- Neuroscience
- Pharmacology
- Physics
- Plant & Animal Science
- Psychology/Psychiatry
- Social Sciences - General
- Space Sciences
The publication list and biographical details supplied by the researchers are freely available online, although general access to the ISI citation database is by subscription.