Carbon Brief’s ranking of the most highly cited climate publications
The most highly cited publications in Carbon Brief’s Cosmos database reveal the building blocks supporting so many elements of climate science.
Every year, thousands of new scientific documents are published, from studies and reports to books and assessments.
Carbon Brief’s Project Cosmos pulls together the “universe” of climate research, spanning 1.8m publications from almost a century of scientific endeavor.
Research publications are linked through citations – where one study references others, perhaps using their methods, confirming their results or even challenging their findings.
The most influential publications are cited hundreds or even thousands of times, becoming cornerstones of their academic fields.
Carbon Brief has calculated a citation score for each individual publication by counting how many times it has been cited by other research in the Cosmos database.
Using these scores, Carbon Brief has created the Cosmos 500 ranking for the most highly cited climate publications.
(This ranking only counts references from within Carbon Brief’s Cosmos database. This is distinct from the citation count given by, for example, Google Scholar, which counts all the references a publication has ever received.)