The list includes scientists with a profile in the prestigious Google Scholar database, the largest in the world.

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The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) has updated the ranking of researchers who have a public personal profile in the Google Scholar database, the most complete in the world. The list includes the profiles of Spanish scientists working both in Spain and abroad, as well as those of foreign scientists researching in Spanish centres and universities. In 2021, this ranking has exceeded 100,000 Spanish researchers and, as a novelty, this edition shows that 39 per cent of the profiles correspond to female scientists. (Access the full ranking).

The Google Scholar database is a search engine specialising in scientific content and bibliography. At the end of last year, for the first time, the number of unique profiles belonging to Spanish researchers reached 101,121, of which 61 per cent corresponded to researchers and 39 per cent to women scientists. In addition, 165 of the profiles on the list show an h-index above 100, meaning that their articles have achieved a high media impact, according to the metric used by Google. On the other side of the spectrum, however, more than 5,000 profiles have received no references at all. “To this must be added 853 researchers with duplicate profiles and 223 profiles that appear incorrect,” explains Isidro Francisco Aguillo, a researcher at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies (IPP-CSIC) and editor of the ranking.

Among the institutions, the ten most-represented are nine universities and the CSIC, which ranks second with more than 4,000 researchers in the prestigious database. “The list is incomplete; by publishing it we hope to encourage more researchers, especially female researchers, to create their own public profiles,” adds Aguillo. Among the 20 authors at the top of the list, seven of them belong to CSIC centres and institutes, such as Francisco Matorras Weinig and Alberto Ruiz Pelayo, researchers at the Institute of Physics of Cantabria (UNIAN-CSIC) in second and fourth place, respectively; and Santiago González de La Hoz, a scientist at the Institute of Corpuscular Physics (UV-CSIC) in eighth place.