Quality is More than The Number of Parts: Citations vs Number of Papers

Quality is More than The Number of Parts: Citations vs Number of Papers

Prof. Hendry Izaac Elim

Indonesia Highly Cited Physicist

Department of Physics

Faculty of Science and Technology

Pattimura university

Recently, Web of Science (WOS, URL Source: https://clarivate.com/highly-cited-researchers/ ) issued world highly cited researchers based on their citations of whole publications. The reports have been publishing since 2018 up to present time.  The judgement was according to the deepest works on significant indicators of top earthly scientists such as (1). h index, (2). citations and (3). number of papers. 

Among the above-mentioned 3 important parameters of high quality investigators/ scholars, the number of whole citations of a researcher has shown a very significant variable to obtain the best scientist world wide.

In the end of last year of 2024, there were 6,886 Highly Cited Researcher awards in 2024. This evaluation show a transforming human ingenuity into our world’s greatest breakthroughs mostly contributed from all hard working distinguished scientists from many different nations. It shall be pointed out that none of them were from Indonesia. Such information is a "hotumese" (growing in challenges) for Indonesia active scientists among 17,480 islands located in the center of equator of earth.

The lesson of such analysts of WOS has triggered us as an active scholar in Indonesia as the 4th biggest population among 195 countries in earth to flesh back our published works. 

Furthermore, the news of WOS emphasizes that in 2024, the Highly Cited Researchers are only from 59 countries and regions. While only 10 top scientific countries dominated ~85% of the whole works. In addition, from these 10 countries, 6 (US, Mainland China, U.K., Germany, Australia, and Canada) of the top nations contributed ~77% as top global research talented researchers. 

It is amazing to state that US is still contributing the largest number of world highly cited researchers with about 2507 scientists following by China scientists with 1405 researchers. 

The main question is "What is the most significant work contribution of the publications impacts: "Citations vs Number of Papers"?

In order to answer such very important question, there will be a lot of research works have to be carried out by opening the whole files  of 6,886 Highly Cited Researchers (WOW, 2024). 

In this short article, we tried to simplify the solution by evaluating our Indonesia top physicists.

We obtained from SCOPUS free access data (source url: https://www.scopus.com/freelookup/form/author.uri ) that there are only 9 Indonesia physicists who have citations over 3000 citations as depicted in the following figure:The

(Own Source) URL source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/387683187_9_Highly_Cited_Indonesia_Physicists_2025  

The general reason why over 3000 citations in SCOPUS/ WOS is the international standard for highly cited researchers is that it is not very easy for an international scholar to achieve such high citations even after over 20 years of hard works and publications.

From our deep search, we found that many active Indonesia physicists with publications over 100 papers indexed by SCOPUS are still hard to reach over 3000 citations. Here are the list of high profile Indonesia physicists and their top citations in SCOPUS (dated on 4th January 2025):

1. Prof. Rosari Saleh  (number of publications = 197, total citations = 2,656)

2. Prof. Kuwat Triyana (number of publications = 207 ,  total citations = 2,917)

3. Prof. Terry Mart (number of publications = 168, total citations:2,388 )

4. Prof.  Abdullah, Mikrajuddin S. (number of publications = 207, total citations = 2,855) 

5. Prof. Tahir, Dahlang (number of publications = 233, total citations = 2,884)

6. Prof. Taer, Erman (number of publications = 156, total citations = 2,622) ,

et cetera. 

In conclusion, we summarize that Quality is More than The Number of papers.