The identification of highly cited researchers in literature databases: How are different approaches to identify these researchers able to capture Nobel laureates?

For many years, Clarivate has used publication and citation data to identify exceptional researchers – highly cited researchers (HCRs). HCRs can be defined differently; the approach of Clarivate is one possibility among several others. For example, HCRs can be identified by considering field-normalized citation rates or absolute numbers of citations; inclusion or exclusion of self-citations; and all authors, only corresponding authors or only first authors. In this study, we are interested in the question of how the different approaches (variants) are able to identify Nobel laureates. Do the different HCRs lists contain a similar number of laureates, and what are the reasons for different results? Our findings show that the different variants of defining HCRs lead to very different representations of Nobel laureates in the identified sample.