Manchester academic recognised as one of the world's most cited scholars

20 Nov 2020

Professor Frank Geels has been recognised as one of the most cited scholars in the world following a major research study, joining Nobel prize winners Professor Andre Geim and Professor Kostya Novoselov in the top 300

Frank Geels, Professor of System Innovation and Sustainability at Alliance Manchester Business School, came 129th in the Stanford Meta-Research Centre's analysis of the world's top-cited scholars.

Using a database of 8 million scientists, the Centre analysed detailed data on multiple citation indicators for 100,000 top-cited scientists across all disciplines. It also specifically looked at the top cited 2% of scientists across 22 fields and 174 disciplines.

Prof Geels was the third most cited scholar in the social science field (which does not include economics/business and psychology). In the science studies discipline, he was the most cited scholar in the world when self-citations are excluded.

Last year, a major report co-authored by Prof Geels was launched at COP25, the UN climate change conference in Madrid. The report identified points of leverage for coordinated international action to accelerate low carbon transitions in ten of the highest emitting sectors.

He also recently contributed to another landmark report on the state of Europe’s environment, which featured a whole chapter drawing on his work around how societies can transition towards more sustainable futures.

"I knew my citation performance was doing well, but I was happily surprised by these results," said Professor Geels. "I suppose they stem from two decades of sustained work in which I placed a new topic (socio-technical system transitions) on the research agenda of environmental social science and innovation studies, developed an inter-disciplinary theoretical framework, and helped to create a new academic community, the Sustainability Transitions Research Network.

• You can access the full list, with more detailed data.