Five KU faculty named among the top 1% of highly cited researchers

Global Highly Cited Researchers 2018 List revealed influential scientific researchers and their institutions.

Clarivate Analytics named people with multiple papers ranking in the top 1% 

by citations for their field and year.

Five Korea University researchers are included in the list—the largest number 

among private universities in South Korea.

▲ (From left to right) Jong-Seung Kim, Jun-Hong Noh, Yong-Sik Ok, Sang-Hyeok Lim, Goang-Seup Zi

Clarivate Analytics, previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters, has published its 2018 Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list, a list that identifies the scholars who have published the most articles among the top 1 percent of the most-cited articles. Five Korea University researchers have been named in the list, and Korea University thus became the private university with the highest number of HCRs in South Korea. The five KU faculty members are Jong-Seung Kim (Department of Chemistry), Jun-Hong Noh (Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering), Yong-Sik Ok (Division of Environmental Science and Ecological Engineering), Sang-Hyeok Lim (Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering), and Goang-Seup Zi (Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering).

Most notably, Professor Jong-Seung Kim has been named a Highly Cited Researcher in the field of chemistry 5 years in a row, since 2014. Professors Jun-Hong Noh, Yong-Sik Ok, Sang-Hyeok Lim, Goang-Seup Zi were named in the category of “Cross-Field,” which has been newly introduced this year.

Professor Jong-Seung Kim at the Department of Chemistry developed a low-molecular-weight compound that leads anticancer drugs to attack only cancer cells, and has published over 400 papers (23,000 citations and h-index of 89 according to Google Scholar). His research team has completed an initial clinical study and now is conducting pharmacokinetics and safety studies prior to entering into clinical trials.

The research interests of Professor Jun-Hong Noh at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering has been in the field of next-generation solar cells. His recent research work on halide solar cells has drawn attention from other researchers.

Yong-Sik Ok, a Professor at the Division of Environmental Science and Ecological Engineering and a co-editor for Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology (CREST), published 10 highly cited papers in 2017 alone. He is one of the most cited authors in the world; as of 2018, he has published a total of 38 highly cited papers.

Professor Sang-Hyeok Lim at the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering has published a number of papers in the top 1 percent on next-generation perovskite solar cells and light-emitting display in Nature Photonics, Energy & Environmental Science, Advanced Materials, and many other academic journals.

Professor Goang-Seup Zi at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering has contributed to the development of strong discontinuity approaches, such as the extended finite element method and the extended meshfree method. He is currently working on obtaining ISO certification for a biaxial flexural tensile strength test method he developed during his tenure at Korea University. He is also actively participating in multidisciplinary research projects with scientists in various fields, including nano-system and semiconductor technology.

Clarivate Analytics publishes its Highly Cited Researchers (HCR) list every year. The Web of Science serves as the basis for regular listings of researchers whose citation records position them in the top 1% by citations for their field and year. Now in its fifth year, the citation analysis identifies influential researchers as determined by their peers around the globe – those who have consistently won recognition in the form of high citation counts over a decade.

Of the total 6,000 global HCRs this year, the total number of HCRs based in South Korea was 58, including those who appeared in the list two or more times. When taking into account four of those who appeared in two or more categories, the actual number of authors is 53, and 50 of these are South Koreans. As 22 Korean scientists were named in the newly introduced category of “Cross-Field,” Korea has increased the total number of HCRs by about 70% since last year.

The number of KU researchers recognized as HCRs has increased in just one year, from 1 to 5. It is important to note that three of the newly named HCRs—Professors Noh, Ok, and Lim—joined the KU faculty through the Special Invitation Program, a KU program launched in 2015 to recruit excellent lecturers and researchers. Under the program, each department is allowed to make a request to invite eminent researchers as visiting faculty any time of year.

The methodology that determines the who’s who of high-impact researchers draws on the data and analysis performed by bibliometric experts from the Institute of Scientific Information at Clarivate Analytics. It uses Essential Science Indicators (ESI), a unique compilation of science performance metrics and trend data based on scholarly paper publication counts and citation data from the Web of Science, the premier web-based environment of scientific and scholarly research literature totaling over 33,000 journals.