Scientists Zhong Lin Wang from Georgia Institute of Technology and Georg Kresse of the University of Vienna were ranked the two highest-impact scientists by standardized citation metrics in 2025, according to a newly-updated Stanford dataset.

Directed by Stanford Medicine professor John P. A. Ioannidis, the dataset tracks authors’ citation numbers alongside factors such as co-authorship and author position. This year’s update is the seventh since the project’s inception in 2019, and captures citations from 2025, based on information as of Aug. 1 from the citation database Scopus.

“Citation metrics are widely used and misused,” Ioannidis wrote in a note introducing the update. “We make the data publicly available to facilitate transparency and research.”

The database arose from a lack of standardization and difficult-to-interpret citation data in science, Ionnidis wrote in a 2019 article. Simply using total citations often resulted in some of the “best scientists” — the team used Nobel prizes as a proxy for excellence —  being left out of the top rankings, Ionnidis and his collaborators wrote in 2016. Their metric aims to be a more accurate reflection of scientific influence.

While there is no absolute measure of impact, “multiple indicators and their composite give a more comprehensive picture,” Ionnidis and his collaborators wrote.

The database also separately monitors potential indicators of research integrity issues, such as self-citations and retracted papers.

Wang has been the top-ranked single-year scientist in the database for seven years and is similarly ranked first by career-long impact.

“I am honored to be ranked #1,” he wrote in a post on LinkedIn.