Once a year, Clarivate Analytics announces the prestigious list of "Highly Cited Researchers" (HCR) to highlight the global impact of individual researchers on the scientific community and to recognise their research achievements.
For this purpose, scientific publications of the last 10 years (2010-2020) are taken into account, which are characterised by outstanding citation frequency and rank among the top 1 % of citations by field and year in the Web of Science™, a search tool for scientific literature.
JKI scientist Prof. Dr. Dr. Kornelia Smalla works at the Institute of Epidemiology and Pathogen Diagnostics in Braunschweig and is one of the 2,800 scientists in the HCR ranking whose publications have significantly influenced research worldwide and across disciplines.
Kornelia Smalla studied chemistry at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and earned her doctorate in biochemistry. She habilitated in microbiology at the Technical University of Braunschweig in 1999 and received an honorary doctorate from the Swedish Agricultural University of Uppsala in 2011.
Since 1991, she has been conducting research in her special field of microbial ecology, first at the predecessor institution, the Federal Biological Research Centre for Agriculture and Forestry, and since 2008 at the JKI, the successor to the Federal Research Institute for Cultivated Plants. Her research focuses include the interactions of pathogens and their microbial antagonists in the root zone of plants, but also the diversity of these microbial communities in the soil. The main focus is on the effects of agriculture on the microbiome of soils and crops (s. a. research profile Smalla).
The researcher's scientific findings point to management measures that include crop rotation, soil protection, variety selection, fertilisation and irrigation and help to set up sustainable and climate-adapted crop production systems in the medium term.
We congratulate Prof. Smalla on her achievements and wish her and her team further success in the research world!
Background information on the analysis of the HCR database:
The United States still leads the country ranking with 2,622 of the highly cited researchers, representing a 39.7 per cent share, even though the number of highly cited researchers in the US has declined. Mainland China is in second place this year with 935 highly cited researchers and, at 14.2 per cent, has almost doubled its share within four years. Germany is in fifth place, behind Australia, with the Netherlands in sixth place with 207 researchers.
Background on the HCR methodology here.
Further interesting facts can be found below in the Clarivate Analytics press release on the publication of the ranking on 16.11.2021 .