XJTLU adds Social Sciences to its ESI Top 1% fields

This month, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University entered Clarivate’s Essential Science Indicators Top 1% list of institutions in the field of Social Science, General, for the first time.

This means that the number of XJTLU’s citations in Social Science, General, as ESI defines the field, is in the top 1 percent globally when compared to institutions also publishing in this field over the last 10 years. Following Engineering and Computer Science, this is the third field that has earned XJTLU a spot on the ESI Top 1%, with the University’s overall global ranking continuing to rise.

The number of ESI research fields entering the global Top 1% is an important indicator for the scholarly performance and impact for academic institutions.

Social Sciences, General is a field of study incorporating a wide range of topics, such as communication, education, demography and law.

Prominent papers

During the 10-year period considered, XJTLU researchers published 222 papers receiving 1,810 citations in total in the journals ESI counts for Social Sciences, General. Of those, ESI considers five papers as ESI Top Papers.

ESI Top Papers include both Highly Cited Papers and Hot Papers.

According to ESI, Highly Cited Papers are “papers that perform in the top 1% based on the number of citations received when compared to other papers published in the same field in the same year.”

ESI defines Hot Papers as “papers published in the last two years that are receiving citations quickly after publication. These papers have been cited enough times in the most-recent bimonthly period to put them among the top 0.1% when compared to papers in the same field and added to the database in the same period.”

XJTLU’s International Business School Suzhou contributed four ESI Top Papers in the field of Social Sciences, General, and the University’s Design School contributed one paper considered as this field:

Dr Lixian Qian of the Department of Intelligent Operations and Marketing is the corresponding author of one of the IBSS ESI Top Papers counted in this field. The 2019 paper about dockless bike-sharing systems in China was cited 25 times by researchers worldwide in the journals ESI surveyed. The paper was published by Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, and is available here.

Dr Jianli Hao of the Department of Civil Engineering is the corresponding author of the Design School Top Paper counted in this field. The paper, on the construction and demolition waste minimisation system in China, was published in 2021 in Journal of Environmental Planning and Management.

XJTLU’s citations climbing

Among all institutions in the Chinese mainland, XJTLU now ranks 423rd, which is six places up from previous ranking.

XJTLU has 2,356 papers cited 23,124 times in all ESI fields. These papers have an average of 9.81 citations each.

XJTLU has a total of 41 papers listed as ESI Top Papers. Of the 41 Top Papers, two papers are both Highly Cited and Hot.

XJTLU’s School of Science contributed the most papers to XJTLU’s overall ranking with 17 Top Papers. IBSS has 12 Top Papers, and the School of Advanced Technology researchers published nine Top Papers. The two papers that are both Highly Cited and Hot are from the Department of Health and Environmental Sciences.

ESI is an analytical tool that identifies top-performing research published in 11,000 journals globally based on publication and citation performance in 22 broad ESI-defined fields. ESI considers only journals in the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) in the Web of Science Core Collection.

By Xinmin Han
Data from Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University Library’s XJTLU Essential Science Indicators Research Performance Report, September 2021 Issue
Edited by Patricia Pieterse and Tamara Kaup