DENTON (UNT), Texas — University of North Texas College of Science professors Richard Dixon and Shengqian Ma were recently listed among the top 1% of researchers in their field to be cited by other researchers, according to Clarivate Analytics, a company dedicated to helping companies and universities sort and examine big data and apply it to their research needs.

Dixon, a Royal Society Fellow and Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, is a world-renowned plant scientist. Since 1988, he has been cited more than 80,000 times, 26,212 in the last five years alone. He has published more than 460 papers in national and international journals. He is a Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Director of UNT’s BioDiscovery Institute. His current research interests include biochemistry and genetic regulation of plant natural product biosynthetic pathways and metabolic engineering of lignin and condensed tannins for improvement of forage quality and biomass processing.

Ma, Welch Chair of Chemistry, joined UNT in Fall 2020. He has been cited more than 24,000 times and has more than published 230 papers in national and international journals. His mission at UNT is to lead the synthetic materials chemistry lab on the development of functional nanoporous materials, including metal-organic frameworks, covalent organic frameworks and porous organic polymers for energy, biological and environmental-related applications. Ma came to UNT from the University of South Florida, where he received the 2015 Faculty Outstanding Research Achievement Award and the 2018 Outstanding Faculty Award.

“This is a wonderful testament to the caliber of our research faculty who have cemented UNT as a Tier One Research Institution by focusing on scholarship and innovation,” said UNT Vice President for Research Mark McLellan. “I am not surprised by Dr. Dixon’s inclusion on the list, as he is consistently recognized and cited by his peers as one of the top plant scientists in the world. I am pleased that we were able to bring Dr. Ma to UNT and am excited about his future success here.”

Both Dixon and Ma have appeared on Clarivate’s list of Highly Cited Researchers every year since 2014. The highly anticipated annual list identifies researchers who demonstrated significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers. Their names are drawn from the publications that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science™ citation index. 

“In the race for knowledge, it is human capital that is fundamental and this list identifies and celebrates exceptional individual researchers at the University of North Texas who are having a great impact on the research community as measured by the rate at which their work is being cited by others,” said David Pendlebury, Senior Citation Analyst at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate.