Every year, the data company Clarivate publishes a list of the most cited—and therefore most influential—scientists. The latest list, published on Wednesday, includes 6,868 “Highly Cited Researchers” from 60 countries—3 of whom are from IQOQI Innsbruck: Rainer Blatt, Hannes Pichler, and Peter Zoller.
The number of times a work has been cited by other colleagues in the field is considered, alongside the number of publications in peer reviewed journals, to be a measure of the scientific relevance of the work. For the current analysis, Clarivate's Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) drew on scientific papers published and cited between 2014 and 2024. Researchers who rank in the top 1% in their scientific field in the survey year and have thus had a significant impact on their field are considered “Highly Cited Researchers.”
With Rainer Blatt, Hannes Pichler, and Peter Zoller, three scientists from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Innsbruck are once again represented in this year's list. They are the only representatives from Austria in the field of physics in this year’s ranking.
According to Clarivate's analysis “Highly Cited Researchers 2014-2024,” Peter Zoller belongs to a small group of researchers who have been included in the list every single year, a feat achieved by only 405 people worldwide. Rainer Blatt has been included in the list for ten out of eleven years.