My involvement in global health statistics and summary measures of population health began back in 1991 when I first calculated disability-free life expectancy (DFLE) for Australia and presented the results at the 4th meeting of the International Network on Healthy Life Expectancy (REVES), in Leyden, Holland, in June 1991.

I joined WHO in early 2000 to work with Chris Murray and others on global burden of disease and other summary measures of population health. My engagement with international statistics on child mortality began around 2003 with efforts to get UNICEF and WHO to collaborate on producing consistent annual estimates of child mortality for all UN Member States. This led to the formation of the UN Interagency Group for Child Mortality (UN-IGME) in 2004 and I was a member of it until 2018 when I retired and joined its Technical Advisory Group (IGME-TAG).

I recently stepped down from the UN-IGME Technical Advisory Group and have now finally ended all my consulting work. It’s time for others still heavily engaged in the subject matter to take it on. But my work lives on, at least for a while. According to a recent analysis of Elsevier’s SCOPUS citation database, my total career citations put me at rank 7031 in the world, putting me in the top 0.04% of the 19 million scientists with citations in SCOPUS.

This August 2024 analysis of the SCOPUS database assessed a number of metrics for total and annual citations including a composite indicator (c-score). Results and rankings for the top 100,000 scientists by c-score, and for another 117,000 scientists who fell in the top 2 percentiles within their research sub-field, have been publicly released by JPA Ionnaidis (see here).

Scopus is a comprehensive database for peer-reviewed literature produced by Elsevier (www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus). It covers articles from 1966 to present and fully covers Web of Science, MEDLINE, EMBASE, and ScienceDirect. SCOPUS contains over 80 million scientific publications. There were 19 million author profiles in SCOPUS in July 2024. So the 217,097 highly cited authors based on career publications in their career represent 1.15% of all scientists in SCOPUS.

My rank based on career citations to the end of 2023 (excluding self-citations) is 7031 which puts me in the top 0.04% of all scientists. Based on my citations in 2023 alone, five years after I retired. I am ranked 2,881 putting me in the top 0.015% of scientists for 2023. 

In my principal subfield “General and internal medicine”  there are 6987 highly cited scientists, representing approximately 2% of the scientists in this subfield. I am ranked 113^th in the subfield, putting me in the 2% of the 2% who are highly cited.

Clarivate Analytics also publishes lists of highly cited scientists by research field based on citations in the Web of Science database. The latest published list is for 2023 and 2024 rsults will be released in December. I have been included in the Web of Science lists of the most highly cited researchers in the field of medicine from 2014 to the present. The lists of around 400 researchers are based on the number of highly cited papers (in the top 1% of citations over the previous decade) in the field, according to the Web of Science.

According to Google Scholar, my H index is 119 and total citations of my publications are more than 229,000 as of November 2024.