The College of Engineering is proud to announce that Yury Gogotsi, PhD, the Charles T. and Ruth M. Bach Distinguished University Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, has been named a Citation Laureate by Clarivate Analytics for his groundbreaking research advancing the development of carbon-based materials such as carbide-derived carbons, carbon onions, and nanodiamonds, and their applications in capacitive energy storage.
Dr. Yury Gogotsi
The work of Gogotsi and his team on desolvation of ions in nanopores, behavior of electrolytes in confinement, and fundamental mechanisms underpinning capacitive energy storage has shaped the entire field of capacitive energy storage.
The list of Laureates was announced Thursday.
Citation Laureates are widely regarded as on a research par with Nobel Prize laureates. “The Citation Laureates are of Nobel class and worthy candidates for selection in this or future years,” according to Clarivate, which called their contributions “transformative” and “even revolutionary.” The Laureates have achieved a rare level of citation tallies—with papers cited more than 2,000 times, or in the top .01% in the world—as recorded in the Web of Science citation index, an indication of peerless global influence and leadership.
“Sharing this recognition with my close friend and collaborator Patrice Simon is really special, but I also need to thank all of my students, post-docs and collaborators, who have been working with me to produce high-impact, highly cited publications that had such an impact on the field,” said Gogotsi from his office at Drexel University.
Gogotsi was cited for his contributions in discovering and developing the carbon-based materials that have found extensive applications in capacitive energy storage (Stylus of Samsung Note 9 is the latest one, currently in the news), and toward understanding the mechanisms of operation of electrochemical capacitors, commonly known as supercapacitors or ultracapacitors.
“Yury is an outstanding and prolific researcher in nano- and two-dimensional materials,” said Michele Marcolongo, PhD, department head and professor, Materials Science and Engineering. “His work is pushing the boundaries of our understanding of important new materials.”
Some 17 honorees were named Citation Laureates in physiology and medicine, physics, chemistry, and economics. Laureates span the globe from the United States to South Korea. Gogotsi was one of three collaborators and colleagues recognized in the category of physics. Also named with Gogotsi were: Rodney S. Ruoff of the IBS CMCM Center and Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea; and Patrice Simon of the Paul Sabatier University Toulouse III and CNRS, Toulouse, France.
Since 2002, the Citation Laureates announcement typically falls a few weeks before the disclosure of the year’s Nobel Prize winners. In fact, the awards are closely linked, as Clarivate uses quantitative data to make annual forecasts about future Nobel Prize recipients. To date, 46 Citation Laureates have gone on to be named Nobel Prize-winners, often within a few years of their selection.
“In seeking Citation Laureates, our analysts refine their search for instances in which this highly cited work is clearly associated with a significant discovery or advance on a scale that the Nobel committees typically reward,” according to Clarivate.
Since 2002, only about 300 scientists have been named Citation Laureates.
Clarivate Analytics is a leader in providing insights and analytics enabling researchers to accelerate important discoveries. Although peer review remains the primary method determining scientific prowess, citations provide a parallel approach by which individual contributions to science and technology can be appraised. The analysis is objective. It is based on citations of scientists’ work by their peers and a bibliometric analysis of the impact the cited work has had on a broad field of science, such as physics or chemistry.
Gogotsi is the founding director of the A.J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute. In another recent, dramatic first, he earned an h-index value exceeding 100 (105 at the moment) from Web of Science, the highest ever received by a professor in Drexel’s history. Gogotsi has been with Drexel since 2000.
The Web of Science is an on-line resource reflecting the indexed contents of more than 34,000 journals and source materials. To provide a clearer picture of the contributions Citation Laureates, Clarivate notes that some 45.5 million scientific papers have been published since 1970. Of those, just 4,500, or .01%, have been cited 2,000 times or more. Gogotsi’s materials science contributions fall within this slim field of exceptional achievers.