Cited more than 100,000 times

Matthias Mann, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry, is one of the few scientists worldwide whose publications have been referenced so many times.

The footnote is part of research. It makes clear which colleagues have provided impulses for one’s own experiments or conclusions. If one assesses all these citations from all scientific articles, as Thomson Reuters does, it can also be determined which researchers have been cited especially often – and, thus, have an especially high reputation. Matthias Mann, who is represented on www.researcherid.com with more than 550 publications, and who has an h-index of 157, has now crossed a magical boundary: the number of citations has climbed to over 100,000. Globally this applies to very few researchers, according to experienced bibliometricians. Since a table of authors by absolute citation ranking does not exist, they rely here on sample analyses, which classify Mann as the most cited scientist in Germany.

The biochemist is pleased with this value, but also knows that there are researchers with similar reputations who can never reach such figures because less is published in their field of work. Mann’s field is proteomics, where he was among the founders. Here, mass spectroscopy is used to investigate the totality of proteins in the cell; this makes the building blocks of life comprehensible. “It is great that a field which has not yet existed for a long time, now produces the highest citations”, says Mann. Incidentally, his best placed paper reaches almost 6000 citations.

JE