Academic rankings platform Research.com has finished updating its knowledge domain-specific league tables listing the world’s best researchers and universities based on a snapshot of publication activity from late 2024. Five Skoltech researchers have been named among the five leading exponents of their respective disciplines in Russia. Over the past three years, they have all improved their positions in the rankings.

Distinguished Professor Artem R. Oganov, who heads the Material Discovery Laboratory at Skoltech, has been recognized as chemist No. 1 and materials scientist No. 2 nationwide. This year, 70 Russian researchers are featured in the ranking for chemistry and 42 for materials science.

“It is no doubt a pleasure to appear in a ranking of this kind based on scientific criteria, even more so when you end up taking the first place,” Oganov responded to the news. “That said, it bears remembering that the role of a scientist is determined by their research results, not a position in a ranking table. And those research results are often appreciated in retrospect, based on criteria that are very hard to embed into an algorithm or an automatically generated ranking table. I do hope that my results will be of use to humanity.”

The director of Skoltech Bio, Professor Mikhail Gelfand placed second among Russians in the newest installment of the geneticist ranking, up two positions from three years ago. Among a total of nine researchers from Russia, that ranking also features the director of Skoltech Neuro, Professor Philipp Khaitovich, at No. 4, up from No. 7.

The best mathematician ranking of Research.com listed 27 Russian researchers, with the head of the Laboratory of Computational Intelligence, Professor Ivan Oseledets of Skoltech AI, and the director of the Krichever Center, Professor Andrey Marshakov, placing fourth and fifth, respectively.

The subject-specific rankings of top researchers on Research.com are updated over the course of the year based on a snapshot of publication data formed at the end of the preceding year. For most of these subject rankings, the latest installment is the one numbered fourth. That includes chemistry, materials science, mathematics, genetics, biology and biochemistry, as well as mechanical and aerospace engineering. That edition draws on the data of November 27, 2024. Researcher scores are assigned based on a metric analogous to the h-index, computed for each discipline individually. The final ranking table for each subject features 2,000 leading researchers, selected from 167,000 geneticists, 121,000 chemists, 97,000 biologists and biochemists, 67,000 engineers, 38,000 materials scientists, and 15,000 mathematicians.

Besides the league tables for top researchers, the platform also releases university rankings. In the recently updated domain-specific rankings, Skoltech placed among the three best schools in Russia for genetics (No. 1 nationwide), materials science and biology and biochemistry (No. 2), chemistry and machine and aerospace engineering (No. 3). The general ranking, which usually gets updated in the end of summer, the Institute currently holds the second place in Russia and scores the highest nationally on the h-index per capita.