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BIST among elite research institutes in the world for scientific excellence and production

By July 24, 2020BIST

From its founding in 2015, BIST quickly rose to join the ranks of top international research institutions. The most recent BIST bibliometric analysis demonstrates the accomplishments of BIST since its inception, in terms of scientific production and excellence.

Researchers at BIST centres have been signing all scientific publications with an affiliation to the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology since October 2015, resulting in an immediate and significant impact on the visibility of the quality research done at the BIST centres, both at the local and
international levels.

A total of 5,452 publications by BIST researchers have appeared in scientific journals and conference proceedings between October 2015 until June 2020, with 1,382 publications appearing in 2019. This level of output continues the upward trend in the number of publications per year, growing year to year from 945 in 2016, to 1,119 in 2017, and 1,307 in 2018.

In the three-year period from 2016 to 2018 alone, BIST publications represented 6.1% of the scientific publications in all of Catalonia and 1.68% of those in all of Spain according to the Web of Science Core Collection database. These percentages are even higher when counting only publications in journals in the first quartile (Q1): 8.3% of overall Catalan production and 2.49% at the Spanish level.

The large majority of publications by BIST researchers are in fact in Q1 journals. In 2019, total Q1 journal publications were 74.2% (according to the Journal Citation Reports – JCR) and 84.9% (according to the Scimago Journal & Country Rank – SJR). These percentages are higher than those corresponding to Catalonia (56.5%), the United Kingdom (55%), Spain (52.7%), France (52.1%), the United States of America (51.3%), and Germany (51.1 %).

Publications by BIST researchers have also been highly cited, a strong indicator of scientific excellence. BIST publications have an average of 16.49 citations per article (according to the Science Citation Index Expanded database from 2016 to present), which is comparable to other top institutions in the world such as the Weizmann Institute of Science (14.75) and the California Institute of Technology (17.19).

In terms of international collaboration, since the launch of BIST, 3,824 documents (70.1 % of the total) have been published jointly with top research entities from other countries. BIST researchers favour most their collaboration with the CNRS, the Max Planck Society, the University of London, University College London, the US Department of Energy, and Stanford University.