Science-wide mapping of institutions based on affiliated authors' impact and research integrity proxies

Abstract

Abstract We aimed to generate institution-level data of indicators that may reflect, as proxies, the impact and the research integrity of the authors affiliated with them and that also adjust for institution size and scientific subfields where these authors work. We used the Scopus database to generate institution-level data on top-cited authors (according to a composite citation indicator) and three indicators that may reflect problems with research integrity: the total number of authorships in papers retracted for reasons other than publisher/journal errors, and subfield-adjusted proportions of top-cited authors who have high (>95% percentile) self-citation rates or high (>95% percentile) rates of publications in Scopus-discontinued titles. There was modest overlap among top institutions based on volume and based on number of top-cited authors. However, there was minimal overlap when institutions with the highest proportions of top-cited authors were considered; these included mostly research institutes and tech organizations and only a minority of universities. Institutions with the highest self-citation, discontinuation and retraction penalties clustered in specific countries such as Saudi Arabia, People's Republic of China, Malaysia, Iran, India and Indonesia. The publicly available datasets that we provide allow the exploration of institution-level research assessments that balance high impact against proxies of diverse aspects of research integrity.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Royal Society Open Science, 2026 · DOI ↗