Frank Geels, Professor of System Innovation and Sustainability, has been recognised as one of the most cited scholars in the world following a major research study.
The Stanford Meta-Research Centre has published an analysis of top-cited scholars in 2019, and Prof Geels is included in the list of the top 300 most cited scholars across all fields and disciplines, coming 129th.
Using a database of 8 million scientists, the Centre analysed detailed data on multiple citation indicators for 100,000 top-cited scientists across all disciplines. It also specifically looked at the top cited 2% of scientists across 22 fields and 174 disciplines. Prof Geels was the third most cited scholar in the social science field (which does not include economics/business and psychology). In the science studies discipline he was the most cited scholar in the world when self-citations are excluded.
He said: “I knew my citation performance was doing well but I was happily surprised by these results. I suppose they stem from two decades of sustained work in which I placed a new topic (socio-technical system transitions) on the research agenda of environmental social science and innovation studies, developed an inter-disciplinary theoretical framework, and helped to create a new academic community, the Sustainability Transitions Research Network.”
Global recognition
Last year a major report co-authored by Prof Geels was launched at COP-25, the UN climate change conference in Madrid. The report identified points of leverage for co-ordinated international action to accelerate low carbon transitions in ten of the highest emitting sectors. He also recently contributed to another landmark report on the state of Europe’s environment which featured a whole chapter drawing on his work around how societies can transition towards more sustainable futures.
There are only two other scholars from the University of Manchester in the top 300 list, namely the two Nobel prize winners from the Graphene Institute, Professor Andre Geim and Professor Kostya Novoselov. You can access the full list here with more detailed data here.
