National Scientist Lourdes Cruz is most cited researcher from UP

Photo credit: National Academy of Science and Technology, Philippines

National Scientist and UP Professor Emeritus Lourdes Cruz has the most number of publications with the highest impact among UP researchers.

This was according to the Webometrics Ranking of Scientists in Philippine Institutions released in January 2017.

The list is a BETA ranking based on the researcher’s presence in the Google Scholar Citations database.

It includes the top 453 scholars in the Philippines–267 of them from UP–with h-indices of at least five. The researchers were “ranked first by h-index in decreasing order then, [in case of a tie], by the total number of citations as a secondary criteria.”

For this third edition, the Cybermetrics Lab of Spain’s biggest research body, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, used data collected during the second week of June 2016.

Cruz, who is affiliated with the Marine Science Institute in UP Diliman, has an h-index of 54.

Also in the top three are Dr. Antonio Dans of the College of Medicine in UP Manila who obtained an h-index of 38 and Dr. Arnel Salvador of the National Institute of Physics in UP Diliman with an h-index of 29. 

The h-index was developed by theoretical physicist J. Hirsch to measure the productivity of a scientist and the citation impact of his or her publications. An h-index of 20, for example, means that the scholar has at least 20 publications which have been cited at least 20 times. 

Both formal publications and informal scholarly communications published on the web are counted by the Webometrics rankings. 

Last year, there were 111 scholars from UP in the list. More were added after UP’s request to its faculty members to register with Google Scholar.