Top 2% (2026)?

A few weeks ago, I received a text from a friend congratulating me for being in the “Top 2% of Scientists” worldwide (he had seen a post on social media). This is also known as the Stanford/Elsevier Top 2%. I did not know much about what that was really – all I knew was that I had seen that mostly used by international universities but did not pay much attention to it. It turns out that a few universities do release news items about faculty being in this list…

I looked it up (of course). Be warned though, just looking up “Top 2 percent scientist” on Google will bring up a lot of dodgy websites (e.g., websites with banner ads trying to get you to install or buy something). The official site where you can download the data is here. This is a dataset put together by John P.A. Ioannidis at Stanford University. Older versions of the Excel spreadsheet with the data can be found at the link as well. You can find a searchable database (without banner ads) here.

After reading about it a bit more, I learned two things:

1. Stanford does not endorse this list

The list is put together (using data from Scopus) by a researcher who is affiliated with Stanford. But it is not an award given out by Stanford (which then brings up a question of why Stanford allows its name to be used in this manner?). Some postings on social media indicate that it is Stanford University that puts together this list– but that is incorrect. Strange.

2. If you want to boost your citations, join big research groups

If you come up with guidelines that people will use, get invited to be a member of one of these large research groups (with dozens of contributors). If you look at Ioannidis’ Google Scholar citations, they are through the roof! 760,000 as of Nov 2026– I didn’t even know you could get numbers that high– and that is impressive.