All in an afternoon's work: An analysis of scientific output of scientists based in Singapore

In the spirit of the Highly Cited Researchers, I decided to do my own analysis of the scientific output of scientists based in Singapore institutions. The database I used is Scopus from Elsevier and I used SciVal to pull out 5 key numbers of the scientists. The first is Scholarly Output, this is the fundamental measurement in the old days of how "productive" a scientist was. Basically it is just a sum total of the number of publications over a certain period of time. The second metric is Total Citations. Basically this is a proxy of how popular one's papers have been. This proxy is linked to the scholarly output in the sense that the more a scientist publishes, the probability of more total citations he/she will garner will increase. The third metric is Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI). FWCI score comes from the Scopus database and shows how the article's citation count compares to similar articles in the same field and timeframe.  A score of 1.00 means the article is cited as it would be expected, greater than 1.00 the article is doing better than expected, and less than 1.00 the article is underperforming.  Because the FWCI comes from the Scopus database, only documents within the database (1996 to the present) will have a FWCI. Because the FWCI includes field normalization, theoretically, the score should be a better indicator of performance than a raw citation count. The fourth metric is the Citations per Paper. The core principle of citation metrics is the assumption that when an article is cited by another academic, it has had an impact on their research. The validity of this assumption is a matter of debate – after all, there are many reasons why an academic might choose to cite another person’s work, and those reasons do not always reflect the ‘quality’ of the cited work. Nevertheless, citations provide a way to measure the extent to which the published academic community has engaged with a given piece of research. However, given that first metric is linked with second metric, this number tells us the quality of each paper based on the average citations. The fifth metric is H-index. The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications.

So what do we have here? Using all these metrics and assuming that all of them carry the same weightage, I proceed to normalize against what I would consider the top of the field. Note that the Scholarly Output is counted over the years from 2016 to 2019. I started to imagine what a top world class researcher will be like. Probably 200 publications in this period, 5000 citations, 200 citations/paper, H-index of 100 and FWCI of 15. Now, this sort of person is imaginary and I used this imaginary top guy as a benchmark. So I came up with this index, let's call it the Saturday Afternoon Index. Saturday Afternoon Index = (Scholarly output / 200) + (Total citations / 5000) + (FWCI / 15) + (Citations per paper / 200) + (H-index / 100). I generated a chart which looks something like this.

I looked at the names on this list and many familiar names pop out. Some are Highly Cited, some have won multiple awards, some have obtained big grants. Whatever it is, these folks are the key players in Singapore science. Let's give all of them an encouragement and congratulate them for being ranked on the Saturday Afternoon Index!!

1 Lou, Xiongwen

2 Wong, Andrew

3 Zhang, Hua

4 Ramakrishna, Seeram A.

5 Yu, Le

6 Zhang, Rui

7 Cheng, Ching Yu

8 Tai, E. Shyong

9 Guan, Buyuan

10 Jafar, Tazeen Hasan

11 Pumera, Martin

12 Pu, Kanyi

13 Boehm, Bernhard Otto

14 Chung, Tai Shung Neal

15 Zhao, Yanli

16 Zeng, Yong

17 Fan, Hongjin

18 Xie, Liliua Hua

19 Loh, Xian Jun

20 Chan, Angelique Wei Ming

21 Tan, Chaoliang

22 Yan, Shuicheng

23 Chen, Xiaodong

24 Chua, Tatseng

25 Liu, Zheng

26 Loh, Kian Ping

27 Shen, Zexiang

28 Niyato, Dusit (Tao)

29 Zhang, Rui

30 Suganthan, Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam

31 Cambria, Erik

32 Neto, Antonio H.Castro

33 Zhang, Qichun

34 Pennycook, Stephen J.

35 Malhotra, Rahul

36 Ginhoux, Florent

37 Zhang, Xiao

38 Wang, Xin

39 Sethi, Gautam

40 Chen, Zhong

41 Wang, Gang

42 Yan, Alexqingyu

43 Zhen, Xu

44 Wang, John

45 Lim, Chwee Teck

46 Sum, T. C.

47 Lin, Jianyi

48 Qiu, Cheng Wei

49 Lin, Hsin

50 Liu, Xiaogang

51 He, Xiangnan

52 Aung, Tin

53 Zhang, Yongwei

54 Xie, Jianping

55 Xu, Zhichuan

56 Fane, A. G.(Tony)

57 Shen, Hanming

58 Lee, Pooi See

59 Xiong, Qihua

60 Lim, Seng Gee

61 Ding, Jun

62 Car, Josip

63 Ge, Shuzhi Sam

64 Madhavi, Srinivasan S.

65 Wen, Changyun

66 Feng, Jiashi

67 Chao, Dongliang

68 Mhaisalkar, Subodh Gautam

69 Mathews, Nripan

70 Tan, Yee Joo

71 Quek, Tony Q.S.

72 Lee, Chengkuo

73 Liu, Bin

74 Wang, Rong

75 Lin, Weisi

76 Hausenloy, Derek John

77 Liu, Bin (NTU)

78 Chen, Bo

79 van Dam, Rob Martinus

80 Saw, Seangmei

81 Luk'Yanchuk, Boris S.

82 Wang, Hou

83 Gubler, Duane J.

84 Huang, Ying

85 Yuen, Chau H.

86 Carvalho, Alexandra

87 Zheludev, Nikolay I.

88 Thiéry, Jean Paul

89 Chng, Wee Joo

90 Liu, Xiaogang

91 Du, Yonghua

92 Thakor, Nitish Vyomesh

93 Richards, Arthur Mark

94 Lam, Carolyn S.P.

95 Poria, Soujanya

96 Tu, Wengguang

97 Chua, Chee Kai

98 Liu, Jianjun

99 Leong, David Tai

100 Li, Bing

101 Zhao, Dan

102 Ho, Roger

103 Meaney, Michael J.

104 Lim, Kahleong

105 Gluckman, Peter D.

106 Chen, Shi

107 Wei, Jun

108 Liu, Bin (NUS)

109 Yang, Hui Ying

110 Chang, Guoqing

111 Li, Zibiao

112 Loh, Teckpeng

113 Rush, Augustus John

114 Xie, Chen

115 Thiéry, Jean Paul

116 Koh, Woon Puay

117 Yu, Ting

118 Koeffler, H. Phillip

119 Soong, Tuck Wah

120 Shum, Perry Ping

121 Seh, Zhi Wei

122 Venkatesan, Thirumalai Venky

123 Qi, Dianpeng

124 Demir, Hilmi

125 Zhou, Kun

126 Chen, Zhi Ning

127 Kjelleberg, Staffan L.A.

128 Yan, Ning

129 Yeong, Waiyee

130 Liu, Zhaolin

131 Wang, Ping

132 Lee, Jimyang

133 Singh, Ranjan

134 Larbi, Anis

135 Chen, Peng

136 Zong, Yun

137 Xu., Rong

138 Chong, Yap Seng

139 Srinivasan, Dipti

140 Teh, Bin Tean

141 Tan, Daniel Shao Weng

142 Tan, Patrick Boon Ooi

143 Wardle, David A.

144 Wang, Chihwa

145 Gupta, M.

146 Xu, Qinghua

147 Kawi, Sibudjing

148 Lim, Teng Joon

149 Wu, Jishan

150 Liu, Bin

151 Linga, Praveen

152 Sim, Xueling

153 Ren, Hongliang

154 Teo, Yik Ying

155 Chen, Wei

156 Ho, G. W.

157 Han, Mingyong

158 Yang, Wenming

159 Hong, Minghui

160 Zhang, Yu

161 Yeo, Gene

162 Zhang, Gang

163 Wee, Andrew T.S.

164 Yong, Kentye

165 Cook, Stuart A.

166 Loh, Marie Chiew Shia

167 Neoh, Koon Gee

168 Kang, E. T.

169 Cho, Namjoon

170 Sun, Handong

171 Huang, Guangbin

172 Wu, Haijun

173 Panda, Sanjib Kumar

174 Chen, Jinmiao

175 Cheung, Chui Ming Gemmy

176 Chen, Christopher Li Hsian

177 Peng, Shengjie

178 Newell, Evan William

179 Sun, Xiaowei

180 Li, Jingchao

181 Chong, Yap Seng

182 Lim, Teik Thye

183 Eda, Goki

184 Pramanik, Manojit

185 Teh, Bin Tean

186 Duan, Hongwei

187 Sheetz, Michael P.

188 Hu, Guoqiang

189 Li, Shuzhou

190 Chang, Youngtae

191 Chia, Kee Seng

192 Yang, Yiyan

193 Yeo, Gene

194 Kumar, Alan Prem

195 Khor, Chiea Chuen

196 Tan, Patrick Boon Ooi

197 Phoon, Kok Kwang

198 Lu, Li

199 Givskov, Michael C.

200 Wang, Linfa