The table (see related file, right) features the top universities and research organisations in the field of plant sciences and mycology based on highly cited papers published during the period 2000 to 2010, among those that fielded at least 50 such papers.
Three rankings are offered: by number of highly cited papers, by citations to highly cited papers and by citations per highly cited paper. Highly cited papers are defined in the Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators database, from which these statistics derive, as ranking in the top 1 per cent by citations for their field and year of publication.
Some 4,012 plant sciences and mycology papers were identified as highly cited during the period covered, and these were cited a total of 428,316 times, for an average of 106.76. Thus, the top 20 institutions ranked by citation impact surpassed the average score for such influential reports.
The nations represented by these 36 institutions include, in rank order, the US (20), Japan (four), France (two), Germany (two), the Netherlands (two), the UK (two), Australia, China, Spain and Sweden (one each).
Papers in plant sciences and mycology were defined as those published in discipline-specific journals indexed in Thomson Reuters Web of Science database.
Papers published in multidisciplinary journals such as Science and Nature that could be identified as related to plant sciences and mycology were also included in this analysis.
For more information on Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators, see http://science.thomsonreuters.com/products/esi/.
