WoW! Wouter over het Web

One little thing that still puzzles me, is that ISI lists 91 highly cited researchers, but that includes one scientist from Belgium, and another one probably from Spain (I did not bother to sort that out any further) but it is striking for the impression that it leaves for the quality of ISI databases in general. So I consider that the Netherlands has only 89 highly cited scientists.

What does it further matter you might wonder. The ISIhighlyCited is being used for the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings. The number of highly cited scientist accounts for 20% of the score. Okay, so what for these rankings? Only that these ranking are regularly quoted in the Economist, which is read by potential students, or by people in charge of allocation of research funds. But there is more. The (yearly?) ranking of Newsweek is for 1/6 determined by this same data as well. Which is read by potential students or people in charge of...... You get the gest. It all has to do with branding, with name building, with reputation. In the scientific world that is dependent to a large extend on the affiliations mentioned in the scholarly papers published in peer reviewed journals, and subsequently abstracted in bibliographies and other databases such as ISIhighlycited.com.

Researcher connected to our university who has decided to list himself under the affiliation of his sub-institute. I really wonder if the It is therefore very interesting to see under which affiliations these top researchers list themselves. In Wageningen the naming of the university appears to be very difficult. 13 research use 4 different names. We see Wageningen Agricultural University (4x), WageningenUniversiteit (5x), Wagenignen University (3x) and Wageningen University and Research Centre (1x). Slightly odd to see the Dutch name of the Univerity listed in an international database. But perhaps the people from Shanghai are smart enough to count all of these variations as one. However there is a 14th highly cited researcher from Wageningen. I do really wonder if the people from Shanghai recognize whether RIKILT - Institute of Food Safety is also part of Wageningen University?

So we score in Wageningen 14 of the 89 highly cited researchers in the Netherlands. Not too bad. Not too bad at all. Looking at the other Universities, Leiden has 15 highly cited researchers, who produced 6 different affiliations. Utrecht ends ex aequo with Wageningen on a shared 2-3 place behind Leiden. In Utrecht I count 6 different names for the university. 4th is the VU with 10 highly cited researcher (including Katan) they came up with only 4 different variations of their university's name and the UvA is only 5th with 8 highly cited researchers.
Not bad for Wageningen University anyway. Only next time should these highly esteemed professors spell the name of their Alma Mater correctly. Then we will really celebrate.