Analyzing Characteristics of Diversity of Star Scientists by Research Field: Using the indicators of field diversity and institution diversity

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method to quantitatively analyze the characteristics of excellent researchers from the viewpoints of diversity of research fields and affiliated institutions in each research field. We extracted the major highly cited researchers with the top 1% of highly cited papers in each field from 19,536,453 literatures published from 2008 to 2016. Among them, we selected excellent researchers (Star Scientists: SS) who have a significantly large number of highly cited papers. Then, we analyzed the characteristics of SS in each research field using the indicators of field diversity and institution diversity proposed in this paper. As a result, we verified that the diversity of the excellent researchers is higher than that of the other researchers. In addition, it is found that the field diversity of SS in the fields such as materials science and chemistry is higher than that in other fields. Accordingly, the method proposed in this paper can be used as one of the effective methods for analyzing the field diversity and institution diversity of researchers in making science, technology and innovation policies.