Seven of the most influential minds in science

It’s not every day you wake up and find out you’ve been named one of the most influential people in science. But that day recently came to seven Boston Children’s Hospital researchers, when Thomson Reuters named them as some of the most highly cited scientists in the world.

Every few years, the information broker and news outlet combs through its Web of Science and InCites systems—which track the scientific literature—to see whose work other researchers consistently refer to in their papers. It then creates two categories: highly cited papers (those that “rank in the top 1 percent by citations for their field and year of publication”) and hot papers (ranking “in the top 0.1 percent by citations for their field”).

People outside Boston Children’s may not view it as an institution of science, but it’s actually among the world’s largest and best-funded research enterprises, with more than 1,600 investigators. Below are the seven who made the Highly Cited list in this year’s report. (All are also affiliated with Harvard Medical School.)

“There is no greater recognition of the impact of a scientist’s work than to see how much it influences the work of others,” says Kevin Churchwell, MD, Boston Children’s COO and Executive Vice President of Health Affairs. “We are proud to call these seven researchers our colleagues.”

The seven Boston Children’s researchers are:

David Clapham, MD, PhD, chief of the Basic Cardiovascular Research Laboratories and Aldo R. Castañeda Professor of Cardiovascular Research at Boston Children’s and an authority on ion channels
George Q. Daley, MD, PhD, a stem cell biologist and Samuel E. Lux, IV Professor of Hematology at Boston Children’s
Zhigang He, PhD, an axon regeneration researcher in Boston Children’s Department of Neurology
Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, chair of Boston Children’s Informatics Program
Nader Rifai, PhD, a pathologist and cardiovascular disease specialist with the Department of Laboratory Medicine at Boston Children’s
Clifford Woolf, MC, BCh, PhD, a pain researcher and director of the F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center and Program in Neurobiology at Boston Children’s
Yi Zhang, PhD, a stem cell biologist and epigenetics researcher with Boston Children’s Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine

The full report is available as a searchable database and a downloadable PDF.

Thomson Reuters most highly cited scientists David Clapham George Daley Isaac Kohane Zhigang He — (Clockwise from top left) David Clapham, MD, PhD; George Q. Daley, MD, PhD; Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD; and Zhigang He, PhD, are four of the seven Boston Children's investigators named by Thomson Reuters as some of the most highly cited scientists in the world.