Alexander Stark among the world’s most highly cited researchers
IMP Group Leader Alexander Stark was named “Highly Cited Researcher 2014” in a new ranking compiled by Thomson Reuters, a leading authority in assessing citation metrics for the scientific literature. The list identified 3200 researchers in 21 fields, among them twenty scientists with affiliations in Austria. Those named are considered to be the world’s leading scientific minds whose publications are among the most influential in their fields.
As researchers typically cite prior publications that are relevant to their work (e.g. because they provided new insights and ideas, novel methods, or useful datasets), the impact or importance of scientific publications is often assessed by the number of times they are cited.
The new report "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds 2014" is based on articles and reviews published in scientific journals between 2002 and 2012 and took publications into account “that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year indexed in the Web of Science”. This percentile-based selection method compares publications within annual cohorts and thereby corrects for the fact that older publications have had more time to accumulate citations than more recent ones.
“I have always been able to work in extremely supportive research environments and with wonderful colleagues, who have a large share in my achievements. I am also lucky to work on topics that are both new and exciting such that publications can obtain high numbers of citations”, says Alexander Stark. “However, what is truly important for me is that the curiosity-driven research we do is relevant to other scientists, who can base their work on our results. If the award reflects this, I’m happy.”
Alexander Stark studied biochemistry and received his PhD from the EMBL in Heidelberg and the University of Cologne. After holding a postdoctoral position at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and at CSAIL MIT, he joined the IMP in 2008. His current research focuses on the regulation of gene expression in response to developmental or environmental stimuli. Stark is the author of 64 scientific publications of which thirty have been quoted over hundred times and three more than thousand times, according to Google Scholar.