Clarivate AnalyticsTM, the company responsible for managing Web of Science, publishes once a year a list with the scholars that have written papers that rank in the top one percent by citations for field and publication year. Using this list, this paper analyses the profile of the scholars who contributed the most to the evolution of science in the decade ending at 2017 and the methods they used to become top scholars. The study concludes that science is being driven by male scholars affiliated to institutions located in highly developed countries where the official language is English. Scholars who work and publish as large groups and self-cite potentially bias the science agenda and gain possible inappropriate standing. This work concludes that to avoid bias, research budgets need to be more equitably distributed among scholars with multiple profiles, especially including women from Latin America and Africa, and search engine algorithms need to be adjusted to include scholar’s characteristics, such as gender and place of affiliation, and to avoid skewing created by multiple authorship.

Clarivate Analytics Ranks; Profile of Top Scholars; Science Evolution; Trends of Science

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