The highly cited list, published every year, identifies scientists whose research has had significant global impact within their respective fields of study.

According to Clarivate Analytics, scientists and scholars publish more than two million papers in journals each year. Researchers who have made their way onto the most cited list have produced research which has stood out and won peer approval, leading other academics to cite the research in their own work.

Ranking in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year in Web of Science, Highly Cited Researchers are leading the way in solving the world’s biggest challenges. At Lancaster these challenges include: preserving the world’s coral reefs, working to prevent world hunger and pioneering understanding in new materials such as graphene.

The Lancaster highly cited researchers are:

Dr Leonid Ponomarenko is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Reader in Lancaster’s Physics Department specialising in the novel 2D material graphene. Recently he was part of the team of physicists that discovered how electrons travel through graphene.

Professor Nick Graham is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and a Chair in Marine Ecology based in the Lancaster Environment Centre. His research tackles the challenges facing coral reef ecosystems, using large scale ecological and social-ecological approaches to understand and better manage climatic impacts and human use. He is also an adjunct professor at James Cook University, Australia.

Professor Steve Long (FRS) uses computational and experimental approaches to improve photosynthetic efficiency, and works to address the effects of climate change on crop yield. He earned his PhD from the University of Leeds in 1976 and was awarded a DSc (honoris causa) by Lancaster in 2007. He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2013 and has been recognised as a highly cited researcher in the field of plant and animal science every year since 2005. He is a joint appointment with the University of Illinois.

Professor Rahman Saidur has a part-time affiliation to Lancaster’s Engineering Department. He works in the area of renewable energy, energy efficiency, thermal energy storage and nano-materials for renewable energy applications. Professor Saidur has published more than 350 journal papers and the majority of them are in top ranking journals. A number of his papers were listed among the top 25 articles in Sciencedirect published by Elsevier Limited. According to Web of Science, more than 20 papers were listed as ‘highly cited’ papers. He has supervised more than 60 postgraduate students so far.