By Sherri Dibari and Amber Kennedy

More than 50 current and former Old Dominion University faculty are among the top 2% of most-cited researchers in the world, according to a Stanford University study.

The study, “Science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators,” collects data on more than six million scientists worldwide, narrowing the field to the top 2%.

Citations show how many times a researcher’s work is referenced in another scientific publication, demonstrating the lasting significance of their findings. In late 2021, ODU earned the Research 1 Classification from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, placing it among the highest level of research institutions in the United States. The classification is partially based on the level of research activity and number of research staff, another indicator of ODU’s status as a top-tier research university.

Researchers John Ioannidis of Stanford University, Kevin Boyack of SciTech Strategies and Jeroen Baas of Elsevier Research Intelligence viewed the number of career citations of scholarly articles from the first year of publication to 2021 to assess career impact. To compile the list of professors most cited in the past year, the researchers evaluated an Aug. 1, 2021 snapshot of Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature.

The updated list of more than 100,000 scientists includes two categories: career-long citation impact and current-year impact.

The first is based on the number of times a scholar’s work is cited throughout their career. Fifty-three ODU faculty representing disciplines such as engineering, clinical psychology, applied physics, oceanography and marketing were included in this category.

For the current-year impact, 52 ODU faculty were named in such diverse fields as exercise science, teaching and learning, bioelectrics and information technology.

Scientists were classified into 25 disciplines and 176 sub-fields.

More than 50 ODU faculty were included in the study published in 2020.

VMASC’s Dr. Sachin Shetty is included in this list.