More than 80 papers from North America have been recognized with a Top Cited Paper award for 2024 from IOP Publishing, which publishes Physics World. The prize is given to corresponding authors who have papers published in both IOP Publishing and its partners’ journals from 2021 to 2023 that are in the top 1% of the most cited papers.
Among the awardees are astrophysicists Sarah Vigeland and Stephen Taylor who are co-authors of the winning article examining the gravitational-wave background using NANoGrav data. “This is an incredible validation of the hard work of the entire NANOGrav collaboration, who persisted over more than 15 years in the search for gravitational wave signals at wavelengths of lightyears,” says Vigeland and Taylor in a joint e-mail.
They add that the article has sparked and unexpected “interest and engagement” from the high-energy theory and cosmology communities and that the award is a “welcome surprise”.
While citations give broader visibility, the authors say that research is not impactful because of its citations alone, but rather it attracts citations because of its impact and importance.
“Nevertheless, a high citation count does signal to others that a paper is relevant and worth reading, which will attract broader audiences and new attention,” they explain, adding that factors that make a research paper highly citable is often because it is “an interesting problem” that intersects a variety of different disciplines. “Such work will attract a broad readership and make it more likely for researchers to cite a paper,” they say.
Aiming for impact
Another top-cited award winner from North America is bio-inspired engineer Carl White who is first author of the winning article about a tuna-inspired robot called Tunabot Flex. “In our paper, we designed and tested a research platform based on tuna to close the performance gap between robotic and biological systems,” says White. “Using this platform, termed Tunabot Flex, we demonstrated the role of body flexibility in high-performance swimming.”
White notes that the interdisciplinary nature of the work between engineers and biologists led to researchers from a variety of topics citing the work. “Our paper is just one example of the many studies benefitting from the rich cross-pollination of ideas to new contexts,” says White adding that the IOP Publishing award is a “great honour”.
White states that scientific knowledge grows in “irregular and interconnected” ways and tracing citations from one paper to another “provides transparency into the origins of ideas and their development”.
“My advice to researchers looking to maximize their work’s impact is to focus on a novel idea that addresses a significant need,” says White. “Innovative work fills gaps in existing literature, so you must identify a gap and then characterize its presence. Show how your work is groundbreaking by thoroughly placing it within the context of your field.”
- For the full list of top-cited papers from North America for 2024, see here. To read the award-winning research click here and here.For the full in-depth interviews with White, Vigeland and Taylor see here.
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