2022 List of 1,000 Best Female Scientists in the World Released

On October 20, Research.com released its annual list of the most influential female scientists of 2022. As part of their efforts to curb the underrepresentation of women in STEM and related awards programs, each year the Research.com team curates a list of 1,000 female researchers from across the globe and shares it online, recognizing the most influential researchers across a variety of fields.

This year, JoAnn E. Manson, PhD, of Harvard Medical School comes in first place with an exceptionally high H-index of 308, along with 362,689 citations and 2,031 publications. An H-index is a score that measures both the productivity and citation impact of an author’s publications. Manson is a professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard University and is known for her work in women’s health. She is followed by Virginia Man-Yee Lee, PhD, a neuropathologist from the University of Pennsylvania, and Aviv Regev, PhD, a computational biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The selection methodology

The Research.com team uses the H-index to determine where in the list a scientist falls. With data from 166,880 scientists from Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Graph, Research.com performed a “meticulous examination” of the candidates to ensure that only genuine researchers are included in the ranking. Along with H-index, the team also factored in the candidates’ proportion of their contributions to the given discipline along with any previous awards. This examination involves verifying each profile and cross-correlating it “against publications in a wide range of credible sources.” Though the number of documents published in major journals should not define a researcher’s position in the list, this metric serves as a useful secondary gauge of the researcher’s impact on the discipline.

According to the website, the Research.com team is “painfully aware that academic research is still a predominantly male profession, and we believe that female scientists deserve an equal chance to be represented and praised for their achievements. Our aim is to inspire female scholars, women considering an academic career, as well as decision-makers worldwide with the example of successful women in the scientific community. We hope that it will contribute to providing more opportunities and equal chances for women in science.”