ISI's 50 Most Cited Chemists, 1981-June 1997, ranked by total citations:

David A. Pendlebury

          Name           Papers         Citations      Cites/Paper
                         81-June 97     81-June 97      (Impact)

          1-10

          A.Bax          152            21,655         142.47
          J.A.Pople      176            14,044          79.80
          P.V.Schleyer   525            13,559          25.83
          R.R.Ernst [N]  182            13,069          71.81
          G.M.Whitesides 318            12,310          38.71

          H.F.Schaefer   515            11,921          23.15
          J.C.Huffman    577            11,654          20.20
          A.L.Rheingold  830            11,317          13.63
          D.Seebach      349            11,275          32.31
          J.M.Lehn [N]   307            10,823          35.25

          11-20

          T.J.Meyer      267            10,490          39.29
          R.E.Smalley[N]  96            10,456         108.92
          A.J.Bard       333            10,365          31.13
          D.G.Truhlar    328            10,310          31.43
          J.J.P.Stewart   39            10,179         261.00

          E.J.Corey [N]  303            10,129          33.43
          F.A.Cotton     634             9,911          15.63
          P.A.Kollman    140             9,703          69.31
          M.J.S.Dewar    119             9,701          81.52
          W.L.Jorgensen  154             9,695          62.95

          21-30

          R.N.Zare       290             9,617          33.16
          B.M.Trost      332             9,302          28.02
          C.W.Bauschlicher 351           9,139          26.04
          A.H.White      866             9,107          10.52
          R.Taylor       221             9,020          40.81
          R.J.Bartlett   251             8,984          35.79
          G.A.Somorjai   328             8,958          27.31
          K.N.Houk       287             8,654          30.15
          T.J.Marks      217             8,366          38.55
          S.J.Lippard    230             8,342          36.27

          31-40

          K.Raghavachari 123             8,272          67.25
          R.Hoffmann [N] 248             8,269          33.34
          A.H.Zewail     211             8,208          38.90
          J.L.Atwood     348             8,109          23.30
          M.B.Hursthouse 659             8,008          12.15
          J.M.White      367             7,961          21.69
          K.B.Sharpless  148             7,931          53.59
          R.Freeman      151             7,961          52.32
          D.J.Williams   656             7,761          11.83
          R.R.Schrock    235             7,725          32.87

          41-50

          H.W.Kroto [N]  140             7,514          53.67
          M.Karplus      141             7,459          52.90
          G.M.Sheldrick  441             7,453          16.90
          D.A.Evans      148             7,409          50.06
          L.A.Paquette   529             7,402          13.99
          G.Ertl         242             7,347          30.36
          K.C.Nicolaou   228             7,337          32.18
          R.Noyori       183             7,281          39.79
          W.A.Herrmann   387             7,337          18.57
          D.H.R.Barton[N]407             7,183          17.65


[N] = Nobel laureate.

          From:

          David A. Pendlebury
          Analyst, Research Department
          Institute for Scientific Information, Inc (ISI)
          3501 Market Street
          Philadelphia, PA USA 19104
          Tel 215-386-0100, ext 1411
          Fax 215-387-1266
          Email dpendle@isinet.com


Notes and Elaborations

The following data are offered for your interest. I recently searched the ISI database, 1981-June 1997, for all chemistry papers and their citation counts (how many times they were cited) through 1997. I then summarized the data by author name (ISI indexes all authors on a paper, not just first author). Thus, the statistics below represent so-called all-author counts.

It is important to recognize what I surveyed and what I did not. The data represent citations recorded over 1981-June 1997 to ISI-indexed chemistry papers 1981-June 1997, and do not represent citations to books, to pre-1980 papers indexed by ISI, or to any papers not indexed by ISI during 1981-June 97. We have defined chemistry as any paper appearing in journals that ISI has classified as chemistry, organic chemistry, physical chemistry, chemical engineering, analytical chemistry and all chemistry subfields used for Current Contents.

There were some 627,871 unique author names found in the set. Only 10,858 (1.7%) were cited 500 times or more. The 50 names below appear on the top of the first page of a printout of the authors cited 500 times or more that runs about 100 pages. These 50 highly cited chemists represent the top .01% worldwide in terms of total citations.

Seven Nobel laureates appear (marked by [N]), and I bet another 6-10 listed here are Nobel laureates-to-be (time will tell if this forecast is accurate). Lists like this one compiled over the last few decades have contained the names of many laureates-to-be. See E. Garfield and A. Welljams-Dorof, "Of Nobel Class: A Citation Perspective on High Impact Research Authors," Theoretical Medicine, 13:117-35, 1992, for an overview.