Two scientists, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Le Hoang Son and Prof. Dr. Nguyen Dinh Duc, from the Vietnam National University in Hanoi, have been named among the top 10,000 most-cited researchers in the world,  according to a list recently published on the US’s PLoS Biology Journal and Academic publishing company Elsevier. 

 Nguyen Dinh Duc and Le Hoang Son have been on this list for four consecutive years: 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. Besides, Duc made it to the list of the world's top 100 scientists in the field of engineering.

Dr. Nguyen Dinh Duc and Dr. Le Hoang Son have been on the list in four consecutive years. Photo: VGP

In the 2022 list, there are 158 researchers among the 100,000 influential scientists working at Vietnamese universities. Among them, 37 are Vietnamese scientists, six more people compared with the ranking published last year.

Several Vietnamese scientists have also seen their ranking improve significantly over 2021. Tran Xuan Bach from the Hanoi Medical University has moved up over 7,000 places from 19,881 to 12,132; Tran Hai Nguyen from the Duy Tan University from 14,704 to 13,713; and Hoang Anh Tuan from the Ho Chi Minh University of Technology from 32,938 to 17,415.

The only one female Vietnamese scientist named in the list is Le Thai Ha, a 34-year-old researcher from the Fulbright University Vietnam. Ha’s rank rose from 74,063 in 2021 to 49,666 this year.

The list was compiled by Metrics Group of professors Jeroen Baas, Kevin Boyack and John P.A. Ioannidis from Stanford University. The group used citations from Scopus, an international scientific database to catalog 100,000 most-cited scientists out of more than 200,000  in its database.

Besides, the Metrics group also published a ranking of the world's 100,000 most influential scientists by lifetime achievement. Vietnam has seven scientists in this ranking, including Prof. Nguyen Minh Tho (Ton Duc Thang University), Tran Tinh Hien (Clinical Research Unit of Oxford University), Prof. Nguyen Xuan Hung (Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology), Prof. Nguyen Dinh Duc (Hanoi National University), Assoc. Dr. Le Hoang Son (Hanoi National University), the late Prof. Hoang Tuy (Institute of Mathematics) and Prof. Dr. Nguyen Ba An (Institute of Physics and Electronics - Vietnam Institute of Science and Technology).

The ranking uses Scopus's database from 1960 to September 2022 to filter out the top 100,000 most influential out of more than 7 million scientists. The criteria consist of: the influence index in the scientific world; total number of citations; the Hirsch h-index; the Schreiber HM-index; the number of citations for articles published as sole author; and the number of citations for articles as the lead and final authors.