The impacts of research at Simon Fraser University (SFU) continued to impress and inspire throughout 2023. We launched a new five-year strategic research plan aligned with the priorities of What’s Next: The SFU Strategy, celebrated three new Royal Society of Canada inductees, SFU’s first three Canada Excellence Research Chairs—and much more.
SFU researchers shared insights that resonated around the world. The top international media mentions were health sciences professor Ryan Allen’s commentary on Canadian wildfires on the Weather Network, philosophy professor Holly Andersen’s mind-boggling facts about time in BBC- Future, and the repatriation of the Nisga'a Nation pole initiated by Canada Research Chair in Indigenous education and governance Noxs Ts’aawit (Amy Parent), reported by the BBC. Each of these stories reached online audiences in the hundreds of millions.
The most-quoted SFU scholar in 2023 was urban studies professor Andrew Yan, who was quoted over 1400 times in the media.
According to Altmetric, SFU research was featured in over 2800 news stories by 885 unique news outlets in 64 countries. There were close to 24,000 X/Twitter posts about SFU research generated by 15,675 unique users in 155 countries. The Conversation Canada, the leading source for news and views from the academic and research community, published 82 articles by 75 SFU scholars.
The Scholarly Impact of the Week series featured the work of over 30 SFU researchers this year and marked its milestone 100th publication.
Thank you to all of the scholars who participated in the Scholarly Impact of the Week series in 2023. We can all be extremely proud of our faculty members, who demonstrate such a commitment to advancing knowledge for the greater good. As the year draws to a close, let me express my gratitude for everything we have accomplished this year and wish everyone a wonderful and restful holiday break.
- Dugan O'Neil, SFU Vice-President, Research and International
We are proud to share the top research articles by SFU’s outstanding faculty in 2023.
We have highlighted below just some of the scholarly works that topped the Altmetric attention scores and the top-cited academic papers from SFU. Below is a snapshot of the top 20 publications of 2023—in both the traditional and Altmetric top-cited rating systems.
Please note: These lists of top academic articles do not reflect all scholarship at SFU, but only those works that appear in these two specific sources. Our faculty have published books, debuted performance pieces and produced artistic and other works which all have contributed to outstanding scholarly impact in 2023.
SFU's top-cited scholars of 2023
Researchers at SFU published 2,600 journal articles in 2023, over 44 per cent of which appeared in the world's top 10 per cent journals. The 2023 top-cited articles look at the field-weighted citation impact which considers the differences in research behaviour across disciplines.
According to Scopus, fields such as medicine and biochemistry typically produce more output with more co-authors and longer reference lists than researchers working in the social sciences. This is a reflection of research culture, and not research performance. The methodology of field-weighted citation impact accounts for these disciplinary differences.
A field-weighted citation impact of 1 means that the output performed as expected within the global average for that discipline, while more than 1 means that the output is more cited than expected. For example, 1.48 means 48 per cent more cited than expected. Based on this ranking, SFU scholars remain authoritative voices across all disciplines and in a range of fundamental, interdisciplinary and applied research areas.
Computing science professor Jiangchuan Liu topped the Scopus list with five articles. Beedie School of Business scholars rounded out the top three; Rosalie Tung is editor of the Journal of International Business Studies and Jamal Nazari studied corporate social responsibility pre-and post-COVID-19.
Note: These data were pulled for December 1, 2022 to November 28, 2023 and do not reflect work published after that date. For collaborative works with multiple authors, only the SFU first author faculty member is listed.
Altmetric: Research reach on traditional and social media
SFU uses the Altmetric database to capture metrics and qualitative data that are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics. Altmetric scores pull data from traditional and social media, from sources all over the world.
Altmetric’s attention score represents a weighted count of mentions in traditional and nontraditional media platforms for a specific research output.
Physics professor emeritus Mike Hayden is a senior researcher with the ALPHA Experiment, whose breakthrough observations of gravity and antimatter topped the SFU Altmetric list. Health sciences professor Scott Lear’s collaboration with the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study of diet and heart disease was number two. Distinguished SFU Professor of Marine Biodiversity and Conservation Nick Dulvy’s marine science research placed three articles in the Almetric top 10.
We encourage the SFU research community to engage with us and submit an Impact idea for 2024.