Energy Gauge: Who Exactly Is In Power?
by Christopher King, Editor

Few topics these days are as pervasive and pressing as the discussion about energy: how it immediately affects matters both economic and political, and how the search for new and alternative technologies must be a priority. Accordingly, Science Watch^® turns its attention to energy as a focus of scientific research.

To identify highly cited energy research of recent years, Science Watch turned to the "Energy & Fuels" category in which journals are covered in the Science Citation Index, part of the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge. This population of 94 specialty journals produced roughly 100,000 papers indexed by Thomson Reuters between 1998 and 2008. From that body of research, Science Watch identified the most-cited institutions, authors, and journals.

The two tables below present institutions ranked according to two separate measures: the first table (1a), by total citations to Energy & Fuels papers published and cited during the 1998 to 2008 period; and, the second table (1b), by impact, or citations per paper, among those institutions that published at least 100 papers in the category during the 11-year span. Highly cited authors and journals are featured in the bottom table (2).

Among institutions ranked by total citations, none surpasses Sandia National Laboratories, with more than 4,100 citations to its 395 papers, although another U.S. Department of Energy installation, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), of Golden, Colorado, is not far behind. Along with these and other U.S. national facilities, the total-citations ranking features comparable government institutions representing other nations, including Spain's Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC), France's Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), along with the national science academies of China and Russia.

Nevertheless, in the midst of these large national institutions, a number of universities also make strong showings in the total-citations column, notably Pennsylvania State University, Imperial College London, and Princeton University.

Princeton, in fact, winds up atop the impact ranking, with an average of 13 citations to its 210 papers indexed in the Energy & Fuels category since 1998. Helping to anchor Princeton's standout performance are two featured names in the author table: the late Supramaniam Srinivasan, who contributed to highly cited surveys of fuel-cell research; and C.K. Law, who has published prolifically on aspects of combustion.

Just behind Princeton, a solid impact score is also posted by the Jülich Research Centre (Forschungszentrum Jülich), a German national laboratory, thanks to its highly cited papers on photovoltaics, methanol fuel cells, and other topics.

Among authors, Ayhan Demirbas of Karadeniz Technical University in Trabzon, Turkey, collected nearly 1,900 citations on an output that exceeded 200 papers. (Of course, a prolific output by itself is no guarantee of high citations; besides Demirbas, eight other authors fielded more than 200 papers in this survey, but none of these names garnered more than 15 total citations.) Papers to which Demirbas contributed primarily discuss biofuels, along with broader aspects of energy policy in Turkey.

In the above table to the right, the Journal of Power Sources distinguishes itself with more than 71,000 collective citations to 7,705 papers indexed by Thomson Reuters since 1998—a total more than twice that of the next journal in the ranking.

Overall, the most-cited paper in this survey, from 1999, reports the achievement of 18.8% conversion efficiency in a thin-film solar cell (M.A. Contreras, et al., Prog. Photovoltaics, 7: 311-6, 1999). The paper's current citation total of 465 considerably boosted the tallies of four authors featured here (all affiliated with the NREL at the time): Miguel Contreras, Rommel Noufi, Kannan Ramanathan, and Falah Hasoon.

Christopher King is the Editor of the Science Watch^® Newsletter, Thomson Reuters.

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Table 1a    

 

Table 1b    

 

Table 2:    

Christopher King is the Editor of the Science Watch^® Newsletter, Thomson Reuters.

Keywords: Energy, energy research, energy and fuels, solar cells, fuel cells, combustion, Sandia National Laboratories, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Ayhan Demirbas.