Top 10 researchers in environment/ecology based on total citations

	Scientist	Papers	Citations	Citations per paper
1	G. David Tilman University of Minnesota, St Paul, MN	65	5,771	88.78
2	John P. Giesy Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI	184	5,196	28.24
3	Peter M. Vitousek Stanford University, CA	78	5,013	64. 4
5	Peter B. Reich University of Minnesota, St Paul, MN	108	4,519	41.84
6	F. Stuart Chapin University of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK	96	4,366	45.48
7	Kurunthachalam Kannan Wadsworth Center, NY Dept of Health, Albany, NY	140	3,893	.81
8	John P. Sumpter Brunel University	36	3,632	100.89
9	John H. Lawton National Environment Research Council, Swindon	37	3,618	97.78
10	Michel Loreau McGill University, Montréal, Québec	57	3,397	59.60

A survey of the research interests of these scientists reveals some major themes: biodiversity, population dynamics, ecosystem functioning and the impact of man, global climate change, conservation biology, and ecotoxicology including the environmental effects of organic contaminants (Giesy, Jones, and Kannan).

The data above were extracted from Thomson Scientific’s Essential Science Indicators database. This database, currently covering the period January 1997 to December 2007, surveys only journal articles (original research reports and review articles) indexed by Thomson Scientific. Articles are assigned to a category based on the journals in which they were published and Thomson Scientific’s journal-to-category field definition scheme. Both articles tabulated and citation counts to those articles are for the period indicated. Naturally, scientists publishing large numbers of papers have a greater likelihood of collecting more citations than scientists publishing fewer papers. This ranking is by total citations. For articles with multiple authors, each author receives full, not fractional, citation credit. Another ranking could be based on citations per paper, which reveals weighted impact. Essential Science Indicators lists authors ranked in the top 1% for a field over a given period, based on total citations. For the current version, 2,800 authors are listed in the field of environment/ecology, meaning that a total of approximately 280,000 authors’ records were reviewed to obtain these results. For more information on Thomson Scientific’s Essential Science Indicators, see http://scientific.thomson.com/products/esi.