Most influential scientists in the world

Posted January 4, 2021

The coordinator-general at INCT Hormona, Prof. Poli Mara Spritzer, PhD, and the coordinator at INTC Hormona Center at Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Prof. Luis Bahamondes, PhD, are ranked among the 100,000 most influential scientists in the world. The list was released by Stanford University, based on databases used up to 2019. Only six hundred Brazilian researchers are in the ranking.

The work, titled “Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators,” used citations from the Scopus database to update the positions of scientists in two different rankings: one that records career-long impact and another that shows impact in a single year (2019).

All scientists were classified into 22 scientific fields and 176 subfields. The report was published in the journal PLOS Biology.

For Dr. Luis Bahamondes, it is an honor to be on the list. However, the expert considers the number of ranked Brazilians still low. “Six hundred is a good number for an underdeveloped country, where research support is not the best, but if we see the glass as half empty, six hundred is a small number compared to the approximately 201 million Brazilians,” he explains. “The development of a country requires research,” he concludes.

Dr. Poli Mara Spritzer stresses that there are less than 200 thousand researchers in Brazil (2016 CNPq data), which translates into a rate of scientists per million population much lower than that observed in developed regions, such as the United States and Europe. “For this situation to change, we need to maintain and expand investments in research and innovation, in training for scientists, and in strategies for establishing these new scientists in the country,” she says. “Investment in science returns to the population in terms of well-being, development, and reduced social and regional inequalities,” she concludes.