World’s Top 2% Scientists: The number of Luiss faculty members among the world’s most influential researchers is growing.

Luiss research has strengthened its international standing in the latest edition of the World’s Top 2% Scientists, a ranking compiled by Stanford University in collaboration with Elsevier that identifies the most influential researchers in their respective fields. Thirteen of the University’s faculty members feature in the two rankings, which recognise scientific impact over an entire career and in a single year. This represents a 44% increase compared to the 2024 edition.

Now in its ninth edition, the ranking serves as a tool for analysing international scientific output, using bibliometric indicators that make it possible to assess its dissemination and relevance within the academic community. The ranking covers 20 scientific fields and 174 subfields, identifying the top 100,000 researchers worldwide or those who rank in the top 2% of their respective disciplinary subfield.

The analysis, based on Scopus data updated to the current year and on citations recorded up to the end of 2025, uses the c-score, a composite indicator that takes into account not only the number of citations received but also the authors’ contributions to scientific publications, considering the various forms of co-authorship. Specifically, the ranking distinguishes between two categories for assessing the citation impact of research. The first considers citations received from the start of a researcher’s scientific career up to the end of 2025 (Career-long impact), while the second looks only at citations recorded in 2025 itself (Single-year impact).

The first category includes Professors Henry W. Chesbrough and Jannis Kallinikos (Department of Business and Management), Thomas Christiansen, Marlene Laruelle, and Mark Thatcher (Department of Political Science), and Christophe Geiger (Department of Business Law and Economics).

The second category, on the other hand, includes Professors Henry W. Chesbrough, Simona Romani, Alessandro Zattoni and Jannis Kallinikos (Department of Business and Management), Sergio Fabbrini, Marlene Laruelle, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Kristina Stoeckl (Department of Political Science), Christophe Geiger (Department of Business and Economic Law), and Sofia Ranchordás and Jorge E. Viñuales (Department of Law and Institutions).

The inclusion of Luiss faculty members in both rankings, along with the increase in the number of recognised researchers compared to the 2024 edition, highlights the faculty’s contribution to the production and dissemination of international scientific knowledge. This outcome reflects the breadth of the University’s research fields and enhances its visibility on the international academic stage.

The full list of researchers and their bibliometric data can be found in the Elsevier archive.