Seven staff from the World Health Organization have been included in the 2018 Clarivate Analytics 2018 Highly Cited Researchers List. This list includes more than 4,000 leading researchers in 21 fields of the sciences and social sciences from around the world, including 17 Nobel laureates.

Now in its fifth edition, the list identifies influential researchers who have demonstrated significant influence on the research community through publication of multiple highly cited papers. The Web of Science is used as the basis for identifying researchers whose citation records position them in the top 1 percent by citations for their field over the last ten years.

Five of the WHO staff included in the list this year worked at the WHO Headquarters in Geneva:  Mercedes de Onis, Chris Dye, Colin Mathers, Susan Norris, and Gretchen Stevens. The other two, Freddie Bray and Jacques Ferlay work at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), WHO’s specialized cancer agency based in Lyon, France. Chris Dye, Gretchen Stevens and myself all left WHO earlier this year.

A new cross-field category was added this year to recognize researchers with substantial influence in several fields but who do not have enough highly cited papers in any one field to be chosen. Two of the WHO staff included this year were named in the cross-field category: Gretchen Stevens and Chris Dye.

In my work on global health statistics and burden of disease, I have collaborated widely with academics across the world, and also worked with many of them on WHO expert committees. Twenty-five of these academic collaborators are also included in the 2018 list of the world’s highly cited researchers, including leading researchers from Harvard University, University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Universities of NSW and Melbourne, the University of Toronto, and the University of Washington.