Daniel Pauly. Photo by Paul Joseph.
The Sea Around Us Principal Investigator, Dr. Daniel Pauly, continues to be among the top 0.01% of the world’s scientists based on the impact of his publications.
This, according to a study published last year in PLoS Biology and updated in 2020, whose authors created a publicly available database of the world’s 100,000 top scientists. The database provides standardized information on citations, h-index, co-authorship adjusted impact, and information on impact in papers according to different author positions (single, first, last author).
Additional field-adjusted information can be used to map a total of 8 million scientists who have published at least five papers in their career across all 22 major fields and all 174 sub-fields.
In the case of fisheries, 590 authors were assessed. Among them, Dr. Pauly is the most cited one.
Excluding self-citations, the Sea Around Us PI received 27,122 citations based on the 323 papers he authored in the period 1960-2019. These results place him as the top-cited fisheries scientist and within a group of 2,000 most-cited authors out of the grand total.
Out of the 323 papers, 47 were single-authored and these received 2,078 citations. When it comes to the number of citations to papers as single or first author, Dr. Pauly received 10,989 citations for 99 papers, while he received 22,748 citations for 296 papers as single, first, or last author.
The PLoS Biology study is considered the first large-scale database that systematically ranks all the most-cited scientists in each and every scientific field to a sufficient ranking depth, including information on self-citations and various metrics.
Previous studies had already placed Dr. Pauly among the most cited fisheries scientists. One, in particular, published in Fish & Fisheries, found that the Sea Around Us PI occupies the first spot on a list of 663 scientists who have authored at least one of the 199 most cited fisheries papers.
Dr. Pauly, together with long-time collaborator Dr. Rainer Froese, is also the initiator of the most-cited database in the fisheries realm, i.e., FishBase, while their 1998 paper “Fishing down marine food webs,” published in Science, is the seventh most cited within the discipline.