List of the world’s top 2% scientists in Bangladesh

On 10^th October 2022 Elsevier along with Stanford University published the world’s top 2% scientists list for the third time[1]. They “have created a publicly available database of top-cited scientists that provides standardized information on citations, h-index, co-authorship adjusted hm-index, citations to papers in different authorship positions and a composite indicator (c-score). Separate data are shown for career-long and, separately, for single recent year impact. Metrics with and without self-citations and ratio of citations to citing papers are given. Scientists are classified into 22 scientific fields and 176 sub-fields”[1]. In this brief analysis, the statistics of Bangladeshi universities and institutions’ number of researchers/scientists are presented to see the status with respect to the previous year. In this list, there are 55 career-long and 142 single-year (2021) based top-cited scientists have appeared in many different research fields. Last year, there were 40 career-long and 97 single-year (2020) based top-cited scientists who secured positions in this list[2]. Hence, the number of scientists has increased by 15 and 45 for the career-long and single-year categories, respectively. It is a clear indication of improvement for Bangladesh.

Out of the 55 researchers in the career-long category, 22, 11, and 22 researchers are from the public, and private (including international universities, if any) universities and other institutions, respectively. Other institutions include many different public and private organizations such as Atomic Energy Centre, Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research Bangladesh (ICDDRB). Twenty-two researchers secured these positions in the list from 15 public universities. Of which, the University of Dhaka and Rajshahi University secured the first position as 4 researchers were from each of these universities. Whereas, Jashore University of Science and Technology (JUST) secured the second position as two researchers are enlisted from this university. Notably, JUST has outperformed other universities in the career-long category. The rest 12 universities have one researcher from each university on the career-long list. This has been shown in Table 1.

In terms of private universities for the career-long category, BRAC university secured the first position with 3 researchers followed by North South University and Independent University, Bangladesh with 2 researchers from each of them. One is from the Islamic University of Technology(IUT), one of three international Universities in the country. The list is depicted in Table 2. For the other category, the list is shown in Table 3.

On the other hand, in the single-year category, out of 142 researchers, 83, 27, and 32 are from public, and private (including international universities, if any) universities and other institutions. There are 25 public universities, from which 83 researchers are enlisted in this category. Last year, there were 21 public universities on this list. In this category, Rajshahi University (10) secured the top position followed by the University of Dhaka (7) and BAU (7). Whereas, last year, BUET (7) achieved the top position followed by the University of Dhaka, Rajshahi University, and SUST with 5 scientists from each of these universities. JUST secured 3^rd position with 4 scientists last year in this category. Data for the year 2022 are shown in Table 4. For private universities, IUT (4) and BRAC University (4) secured the first position followed by North South University (3), see Table 5. Whereas, ICDDRB secured the top position in the ‘other’ category with 16 researchers from this institute as illustrated in Table 6.