Sri Lankan Scientists in Stanford Varsity’s List of Top 2% Scientists, But Can We be Happy?

31 Sri Lankan scientists, have been listed among the top 2 per cent scientists in the world. 

These scientists featured in two lists prepared by Stanford University and Elsevier BV, a Netherlands-based publishing company, for the second consecutive time.

The Stanford University and Elsevier BV have published two separate lists of scientists who have pStanford University and Elsevier BV have published two separate lists of scientists who have performed exceptionally well compared to other scientists. In one of those lists, the scientists have been ranked considering their lifetime contributions to scientific publications, while the other list contains the names of the scientists who are among the top 2% of the best performing scientists during the year 2020. 11 Sri Lankan scientists have been featured in both lists.  

In single-year impact, 24 Sri Lankan scientists are ranked among 1,05,029 scientists in the world and in the In terms of single-year impact, 24 Sri Lankan scientists are ranked among the world’s 1,05,029 scientists, and 18 Sri Lankan scientists are ranked among the world’s 186177 top scientists who have the best career long impacts.

According to the Stanford – Elsevier report published last week, the rank is based on the top 100,000 by C-scores (number of citations, excluding self-citations) or a percentile rank of 2% or above. 

We talked to Prof. Meththika Withanage, the Sri Lankan scientist who tops the list of Sri Lankan scientists in the single year impact list and asked her about the importance of this listing, and she explained how this listing is way better than some of the other ones, “Citations are often used to assess an academic’s research output. There are various citation matrices such as Google scholar etc., but most of them have inherent issues and are therefore misused often. This novel standardized citation matrices ranked scientists based on a composite of total citations, h-index, co-authorship adjusted hm-index, number of citations to papers as a single author, number of citations to papers as single or first author, and number of citations to papers as single, first or last author. ” 

As Sri Lankans Can we be Happy?

In the single year impact list the Sri Lankan presence as a percentage is just over 0.023% while career long In the single year impact list, the Sri Lankan presence as a percentage is just over 0.023%, while in the career long impact list the value is 0.009%. Compared to many other countries, these values are very low and they showcase where we are in the R & D sectors. The graph below clearly shows where we are compared to some other countries in the world, in terms of the number of scientists who are among the top 2% of all the scientists in the world. 

Prof. Meththika Withanage shared her opinion on this observation based on her experience as a prominent researcher in the country.

“We do not have enough representation in these lists, especially with regard to different fields, compared to the number of grants given and the number of researchers we have. “
“As far as I can see there are several reasons behind this, the first one is the Research allowances we are getting as researchers. As we have been experiencing over the years, many good researchers do not receive enough funds needed for their research work. And at the same time in some cases those allocated funds too are not used in productive manner by the researchers” she says.

Prof. MProf. Meththika also mentioned a few other areas that we should look into and improve in order to uplift the R&D sectors in Sri Lanka. “Here in Sri Lanka, in the R&D sectors, the promotion criteria are old fashion. They are not updated according to the international criteria. Universities should adopt an output based evaluation system for allocating grants and incentives to promote research. “
“Political will must be there to suport research. There must be a policy for that..like in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh etc., Here in Sri Lanka, ministers, ministries, the government, and the treasury promote innovations without proper support for research. Without research, no innovation would be a success, ” she emphasized.