AN international news agency has recently produced a list of top-ranking climate academics, showing their expertise and their impact on climate change platform. It is basically a combination of three rankings.

Those rankings are based on how many research papers scientists have published on topics related to climate change; how often those papers are cited by other scientists in similar fields of study, such as biology, chemistry or physics; and how often those papers are referenced in the lay press, social media, policy papers and other outlets.

The first ranking is based on the number of papers published under their names up to December 2020. The work was screened for climate-related work by examining the papers’ titles or abstracts, brief descriptions of the research, for phrases closely connected to climate change, such as climate change itself, global warming, greenhouse gases and other related terms.

These are papers that explicitly focus on climate change. To be included in the ranking, a paper had to be cited by at least one other scientist at least once.

The second ranking is based on a field citation ratio. For each paper, a ratio is calculated by dividing the number of citations a paper has received by the average number received by documents published in the same year and in the same fields of research category. This ranking is meant to measure the influence of scientists’ work among their peers.

The third ranking is based on digital science’s altmetric attention score, a measure of a research paper’s public reach. Most papers receive a score based on references in a variety of publications, including the mainstream media, Wikipedia, public policy papers and social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook. The ranking is meant to measure the influence of scientists’ work in the lay world.

The final score for each scientist is based on the sum of each ranking.

The list contains many climate scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Canada, Germany, Japan, Austria, France and Australia. There is one each from Philippines, South Africa, Peru, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Taiwan and Kenya. There are four from Brazil, eight from South Korea, and six from India. Unfortunately, there is none from Pakistan.

F.H. Mughal

Karachi

Published in Dawn, May 16th, 2021