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Scholarly Impact of the Week: Top 21 of 2021

Established in March 2021, Simon Fraser University’s Scholarly Impact of the Week series has featured the work of more than three dozen SFU researchers from all eight faculties. The goal of the series is to raise the profile of our researchers, celebrate their work and mobilize their research impact. Thank you to all the faculty members and staff who helped us do that.

Throughout this eventful year, SFU scholars have made breakthrough scientific and technological discoveries that have transformed their disciplines, benefitted our communities, and broadened our understanding of the planet. They have kept us safe and informed during the COVID-19 pandemic, enlightened us about the world and our place within it and advanced crucial social justice initiatives. Whatever their expertise, SFU researchers contribute valuable knowledge about a complex and changing world.

 

Thank you to all who participated in the Scholarly Impact of the Week series in 2021. We cannot wait to feature more cutting-edge, enlightening and meaningful research activities in 2022. We wish our entire SFU community a wonderful upcoming holiday season with their loved ones.

Dugan O'Neil, SFU Vice-President, Research and International

 

Our weekly impact series featured significant career achievements such as those made by SFU scholars Pavol Hell, Stephen Holdcroft and James Wakeling. It highlighted the value of knowledge gathered from the past through works by Henry DanielDana Lepofsky and Celeste Snowber.​​​​​​ It pondered the origins of the universe with Levon Pogosian.

Researchers like Laya Behbehani, Alanaise Goodwill, Boydan Nosyk and Travis Salway published important evidence-based studies on how to build more equitable and just societies. Experts like Caroline Colijn worked behind the scenes and in the media to keep the public informed about the pandemic. Two of our scholars, Rekha Krishnan and Alissa Antle had their work featured in The Conversation Canada, one of the world’s most trusted independent sources of news and views from the academic and research community, delivered directly to the public.

We have highlighted below just some of the scholarly works that topped the Altmetric attention scores and the top cited academic papers from SFU. Here is a snapshot of the top 21 publications of 2021—in both the traditional and Altmetric top-cited rating systems.

Please note: These data were pulled December 1, 2021 and do not reflect work published later this year.

 

SFU's top-cited articles of 2021

On average, SFU researchers publish 2,500 journal articles per year, over 40% of which appear in the world's top 10% journals. The 2021 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% 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.

  Faculty SFU Scholars* Publications Number of Citations Field-weighted Citation Impact
1 Faculty of Applied Sciences Ghassan Hamarneh Deep semantic segmentation of natural and medical images: a review 48 85.71
2 Faculty of Science Nick Dulvy Half a century of global decline in oceanic sharks and rays 61 52.26
3 Faculty of Environment Nadine Schuurman The need for GIScience in mapping COVID-19 22 33.78
4 Faculty of Science Matthias Danninger, Bernd Stelzer and Michel Vetterli: ATLAS**  A search for the dimuon decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector 36 32.22
5 Faculty of Science Jonathan Moore Indigenous Systems of Management for Culturally and Ecologically Resilient Pacific Salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) Fisheries 11 20.59
6 Faculty of Applied Sciences Jiangchuan Liu Accurate Localization of Tagged Objects Using Mobile RFID-Augmented Robots 20 17.88
7 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Mark Pickup How populism and conservative media fuel conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 and what it means for COVID-19 behaviors 11 17.19
8 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Garth Davies, Richard Frank Upvoting extremism: Collective identity formation and the extreme right on Reddit 10 16.55
9 Faculty of Environment Francesco Berna A technotypological analysis of the Ahmarian and Levantine Aurignacian assemblages from Manot Cave (area C) and the interrelation with site formation processes 9 15.23
10 Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology Juan Pablo Alperin Communicating Scientific Uncertainty in an Age of COVID-19: An Investigation into the Use of Preprints by Digital Media Outlets 10 14.9
11 Faculty of Health Sciences Charlotte Waddell Public Health Nurses' Professional Practices to Prevent, Recognize, and Respond to Suspected Child Maltreatment in Home Visiting: An Interpretive Descriptive Study 6 14.69
12 Faculty of Science John Clague A massive rock and ice avalanche caused the 2021 disaster at Chamoli, Indian Himalaya 17 14.56
13 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Theodore Cosco What is the relationship between validated frailty scores and mortality for adults with COVID-19 in acute hospital care? A systematic review 12 13.81
14 Faculty of Science Nick Dulvy Overfishing and habitat loss drives range contraction of iconic marine fishes to near extinction 16 13.71
15 Faculty of Applied Sciences Ghassan Hamarneh Deep learning for biomedical image reconstruction: a survey 7 11.34
16 Beedie School of Business Ian McCarthy Big Data for Creating and Capturing Value in the Digitalized Environment: Unpacking the Effects of Volume, Variety, and Veracity on Firm Performance* 15 11.34
17 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Lara Aknin Recognizing the Impact of COVID-19 on the Poor Alters Attitudes Towards Poverty and Inequality 8 11.3
18 Faculty of Science John Clague Can deep learning algorithms outperform benchmark machine learning algorithms in flood susceptibility modeling?   10 11.23
19 Beedie of School Business Fereshteh Mahmoudian and Jamal Nazari Inter-and intra-organizational stakeholder arrangements in carbon management accounting 7 11.02
20 Faculty of Applied Science Alaa Reda Alameldeen Speculative interference attacks: Breaking invisible speculation schemes 2 10.45
21 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Alissa Merielle Greer "It's an emotional roller coaster… But sometimes it's fucking awesome": Meaning and motivation of work for peers in overdose response environments in British Columbia 7 10.38

* Please note: SFU faculty scholars listed do not include all contributors to each publication. Many of these publications include SFU students and non-SFU authors as well. To view the full list of authors, please visit the link to each article. 

** The international ATLAS collaboration publishes a large number of highly cited papers each year, four of which have made our top 21. SFU faculty members Matthias Danninger, Bernd Stelzer and Michel Vetterli are members of this collaboration and authors of these papers. In addition to the paper at number 5, papers published by the ATLAS collaboration also ranked 15, 16 and 20.

Altmetric: What made headlines and caught our attention

It is safe to say that SFU research made waves in 2021, with our scholars and their work enjoying a consistent media presence. SFU marine biodiversity and conservation professor Nick Dulvy’s paper on shark populations went viral this past year, logging over 4000 media mentions, including close to 1800 specifically over Twitter. At last count, professor and Canada Research Chair Caroline Colijn was mentioned globally in the media 3000 times; her article on COVID transmission in schools was one of her most-shared works.

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.

  Faculty SFU Scholars* Publications Altmetric Attention Score
1 Faculty of Science Nick Dulvy Half a century of global decline in oceanic sharks and rays 4092
2 Faculty of Science John Clague A massive rock and ice avalanche caused the 2021 disaster at Chamoli, Indian Himalaya 1072
3 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Lara Aknin Brief exposure to social media during the COVID-19 pandemic: Doom-scrolling has negative emotional consequences, but kindness-scrolling does not 997
4 Faculty of Science Isabelle Côté Promoting inclusive metrics of success and impact to dismantle a discriminatory reward system in science 943
5 Faculty of Health Sciences Scott Lear Associations of cereal grains intake with cardiovascular disease and mortality across 21 countries in Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiology study: prospective cohort study 887
6 Faculty of Science Shahin Dashtgard The 20-million-year old lair of an ambush-predatory worm preserved in northeast Taiwan 746
7 Faculty of Science Nick Dulvy Overfishing and habitat loss drives range contraction of iconic marine fishes to near extinction 725
8 Faculty of Science Mike Hayden Laser cooling of antihydrogen atoms 657
9 Faculty of Health Sciences Scott Lear Associations of Fish Consumption With Risk of Cardiovascular Disease and Mortality Among Individuals With or Without Vascular Disease From 58 Countries 581
10 Faculty of Science Victoria Claydon Long-COVID postural tachycardia syndrome: an American Autonomic Society statement 547
11 Faculty of Communication, Art & Technology Juan Pablo Alperin Communicating Scientific Uncertainty in an Age of COVID-19: An Investigation into the Use of Preprints by Digital Media Outlets 498
12 Faculty of Environment Kirsten Zickfeld Asymmetry in the climate–carbon cycle response to positive and negative CO2 emissions 451
13 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Eric Beauregard Revenge filicide: An international perspective through 62 cases 422
14 Faculty of Science Caroline Colijn COVID-19 in schools: Mitigating classroom clusters in the context of variable transmission 420
15 Faculty of Health Sciences Bohdan Nosyk Association of Opioid Agonist Treatment With All-Cause Mortality and Specific Causes of Death Among People With Opioid Dependence 368
16 Faculty of Environment Anne K. Salomon Physical disturbance by recovering sea otter populations increases eelgrass genetic diversity 316
17 Faculty of Environment Mark Collard A 3D basicranial shape-based assessment of local and continental northwest European ancestry among 5th to 9th century CE Anglo-Saxons 262
18 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Stephen Wright Mentioning the Sample’s Country in the Article’s Title Leads to Bias in Research Evaluation 203
19 Faculty of Health Sciences William Small “People need them or else they're going to take fentanyl and die”: A qualitative study examining the ‘problem’ of prescription opioid diversion during an overdose epidemic 190
20 Faculty of Environment John R. Welch Native American fire management at an ancient wildland–urban interface in the Southwest United States 170
21 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Marlene Moretti Attachment goes to court: child protection and custody issues 153

We encourage the SFU research community to engage with us and submit an Impact idea for 2022.