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The impacts of research at Simon Fraser University (SFU) continued to impress and inspire throughout 2023. We launched a new five-year strategic research plan aligned with the priorities of What’s Next: The SFU Strategy, celebrated three new Royal Society of Canada inductees, SFU’s first three Canada Excellence Research Chairs—and much more.

SFU researchers shared insights that resonated around the world. The top international media mentions were health sciences professor Ryan Allen’s commentary on Canadian wildfires on the Weather Network, philosophy professor Holly Andersen’s mind-boggling facts about time in BBC- Future, and the repatriation of the Nisga'a Nation pole initiated by Canada Research Chair in Indigenous education and governance Noxs Ts’aawit (Amy Parent), reported by the BBC. Each of these stories reached online audiences in the hundreds of millions.

The most-quoted SFU scholar in 2023 was urban studies professor Andrew Yan, who was quoted over 1400 times in the media.

According to Altmetric, SFU research was featured in over 2800 news stories by 885 unique news outlets in 64 countries. There were close to 24,000 X/Twitter posts about SFU research generated by 15,675 unique users in 155 countries. The Conversation Canada, the leading source for news and views from the academic and research community, published 82 articles by 75 SFU scholars.

The Scholarly Impact of the Week series featured the work of over 30 SFU researchers this year and marked its milestone 100th publication.

 

Thank you to all of the scholars who participated in the Scholarly Impact of the Week series in 2023. We can all be extremely proud of our faculty members, who demonstrate such a commitment to advancing knowledge for the greater good. As the year draws to a close, let me express my gratitude for everything we have accomplished this year and wish everyone a wonderful and restful holiday break.

- Dugan O'Neil, SFU Vice-President, Research and International

 

We are proud to share the top research articles by SFU’s outstanding faculty in 2023.

We have highlighted below just some of the scholarly works that topped the Altmetric attention scores and the top-cited academic papers from SFU. Below is a snapshot of the top 20 publications of 2023—in both the traditional and Altmetric top-cited rating systems.

Please note: These lists of top academic articles do not reflect all scholarship at SFU, but only those works that appear in these two specific sources. Our faculty have published books, debuted performance pieces and produced artistic and other works which all have contributed to outstanding scholarly impact in 2023.

 

SFU's top-cited scholars of 2023

Researchers at SFU published 2,600 journal articles in 2023, over 44 per cent of which appeared in the world's top 10 per cent journals. The 2023 top-cited articles look at the field-weighted citation impact which considers the differences in research behaviour across disciplines.

According to Scopus, fields such as medicine and biochemistry typically produce more output with more co-authors and longer reference lists than researchers working in the social sciences. This is a reflection of research culture, and not research performance. The methodology of field-weighted citation impact accounts for these disciplinary differences.

A field-weighted citation impact of 1 means that the output performed as expected within the global average for that discipline, while more than 1 means that the output is more cited than expected. For example, 1.48 means 48 per cent more cited than expected. Based on this ranking, SFU scholars remain authoritative voices across all disciplines and in a range of fundamental, interdisciplinary and applied research areas.

Computing science professor Jiangchuan Liu topped the Scopus list with five articles. Beedie School of Business scholars rounded out the top three; Rosalie Tung is editor of the Journal of International Business Studies and Jamal Nazari studied corporate social responsibility pre-and post-COVID-19.

Note: These data were pulled for December 1, 2022 to November 28, 2023 and do not reflect work published after that date. For collaborative works with multiple authors, only the SFU first author faculty member is listed.


 

 
  SFU Scholars Faculty Publications Scopus Field-Weighted Citation Ranking
1 Jiangchuan Liu Faculty of Applied Sciences Task Co-Offloading for D2D-Assisted Mobile Edge Computing in Industrial Internet of Things 56.24
2 Rosalie Tung Beedie School of Business To make JIBS matter for a better world 31.52
  Jiangchuan Liu Faculty of Applied Sciences Task Offloading for Cloud-Assisted Fog Computing with Dynamic Service Caching in Enterprise Management Systems 27.61
3 Jamal Nazari Beedie School of Business Corporate social responsibility and COVID-19: Prior reporting experience and assurance 26.37
4 Maxwell Libbrecht Faculty of Applied Sciences Obtaining genetics insights from deep learning via explainable artificial intelligence 26.01
5 Steve Marshall Faculty of Education Navigating COVID-19 linguistic landscapes in Vancouver’s North Shore: official signs, grassroots literacy artefacts, monolingualism, and discursive convergence 23.02
  Jiangchuan Liu Faculty of Applied Sciences Lightweight Imitation Learning for Real-Time Cooperative Service Migration 19.08
6 Catherine D'Andrea Faculty of Environment Aksumite Settlement Patterns: Site Size Hierarchies and Spatial Clustering 17.93
  Jiangchuan Liu Faculty of Applied Sciences Network Characteristics of LEO Satellite Constellations: A Starlink-Based Measurement from End Users 17.56
7 Arne Mooers Faculty of Science ‘Lost’ taxa and their conservation implications 17.35
8 Tenzin Doleck Faculty of Education Transition to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic 17.34
9 Yuthika Girme Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Coping or Thriving? Reviewing Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, and Societal Factors Associated With Well-Being in Singlehood From a Within-Group Perspective 16.8
10 Isabelle Côté Faculty of Science Environmental (in)justice in the Anthropocene ocean 16.41
11 Lindsay Hedden Faculty of Health Sciences Ending the generational blame game 16.39
12 Andrew Wister Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Older Adults and Social Isolation and Loneliness During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Integrated Review of Patterns, Effects, and Interventions 15.41
13 Jeremy Venditti Faculty of Environment Grain shape effects in bed load sediment transport 14.97
14 Alexander Karaivanov Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences COVID-19 vaccination mandates and vaccine uptake 14.04
15 Zhenman Fang Faculty of Applied Sciences SuperYOLO: Super Resolution Assisted Object Detection in Multimodal Remote Sensing Imagery 12.92
  Jiangchuan Liu Faculty of Applied Sciences Multi-Objective Parallel Task Offloading and Content Caching in D2D-Aided MEC Networks 12.72
16 Zamir Punja Faculty of Science Glandular trichome development, morphology, and maturation are influenced by plant age and genotype in high THC-containing cannabis (Cannabis sativa L.) inflorescences 12.29
17 Travis Salway Faculty of Health Sciences Uptake of Mpox vaccination among transgender people and gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men among sexually-transmitted infection clinic clients in Vancouver, British Columbia 11.76
18 Veronica Dahl Faculty of Applied Sciences Logic Programming at Elementary School: Why, What and How Should We Teach Logic Programming to Children? 11.54
19 Jessica Stockdale Faculty of Science COVID-19 endgame: From pandemic to endemic? Vaccination, reopening and evolution in low- and high-vaccinated populations 11.1
20 Garth Davies Arts and Social Sciences A Witch’s Brew of Grievances: The Potential Effects of COVID-19 on Radicalization to Violent Extremism 10.74



 

Altmetric: Research reach on traditional and social media

SFU uses the Altmetric database to capture metrics and qualitative data that are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics. Altmetric scores pull data from traditional and social media, from sources all over the world.

Altmetric’s attention score represents a weighted count of mentions in traditional and nontraditional media platforms for a specific research output.

Physics professor emeritus Mike Hayden is a senior researcher with the ALPHA Experiment, whose breakthrough observations of gravity and antimatter topped the SFU Altmetric list. Health sciences professor Scott Lear’s collaboration with the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study of diet and heart disease was number two. Distinguished SFU Professor of Marine Biodiversity and Conservation Nick Dulvy’s marine science research placed three articles in the Almetric top 10.

 

Please note that the attention scores are subject to change over time; some items may appear out of order.
  SFU Scholars Faculty Publications Altmetric Attention Score
1 Mike Hayden Faculty of Science Observation of the effect of gravity on the motion of antimatter
 
2 Scott Lear Faculty of Health Sciences Diet, cardiovascular disease, and mortality in 80 countries
 
3 Nicolas Dulvy Faculty of Science Half a century of rising extinction risk of coral reef sharks and rays
 
  Nicolas Dulvy Faculty of Science A multi-taxon analysis of European Red Lists reveals major threats to biodiversity
 
4 Amy Lee Faculty of Science Predicting severity in COVID-19 disease using sepsis blood gene expression signatures
 
5 Levon Pogosian Faculty of Science Modified Einstein versus modified Euler for dark matter
 
  Nicolas Dulvy Faculty of Science Conservation successes and challenges for wide-ranging sharks and rays
 
6 Masahiro Niikura Faculty of Health Sciences Discovery of lead natural products for developing pan-SARS-CoV-2 therapeutics
 
7 Jeremy Vendetti Faculty of Environment Grain shape effects in bed load sediment transport
 
8 Rolf Mathewes Faculty of Science Ice Patches and Obsidian Quarries: Integrating Research Through Collaborative Archaeology in Tahltan Territory
 
9 Kora DeBeck Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Incidence of HIV and hepatitis C virus among people who inject drugs, and associations with age and sex or gender: a global systematic review and meta-analysis
 
10 Mohsen Javdani Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Who said or what said? Estimating ideological bias in views among economists
 
  Rolf Mathewes Faculty of Science Eocene giant ants, Arctic intercontinental dispersal, and hyperthermals revisited: discovery of fossil Titanomyrma (Hymenoptera: Formicidae: Formiciinae) in the cool uplands of British Columbia, Canada
 
11 Michael Thewalt Faculty of Science On-demand electrical control of spin qubits
 
12 Vincenzo Pecunia Faculty of Applied Sciences Wirelessly powered large-area electronics for the Internet of Things
 
13 Rosemary Collard Faculty of Environment Years late and millions short: A predictive audit of economic impacts for coal mines in British Columbia, Canada
 
14 David Vocadlo Faculty of Science Phage display uncovers a sequence motif that drives polypeptide binding to a conserved regulatory exosite of O-GlcNAc transferase
 
15 Andres Cisneros-Montemayor Faculty of Environment Mapping the unjust global distribution of harmful fisheries subsidies
 
16 David Stenning Faculty of Science An FRB Sent Me a DM: Constraining the Electron Column of the Milky Way Halo with Fast Radio Burst Dispersion Measures from CHIME/FRB
 
17 Sharon Gorski Faculty of Science Bi-allelic ATG4D variants are associated with a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by speech and motor impairment
 
18 John Clague Faculty of Science Less extreme and earlier outbursts of ice-dammed lakes since 1900
 
19 Shawn Chartrand Faculty of Environment High Arctic channel incision modulated by climate change and the emergence of polygonal ground
 
20 Travis Salway Faculty of Health Sciences A systematic review of the prevalence of lifetime experience with ‘conversion’ practices among sexual and gender minority populations
 



We encourage the SFU research community to engage with us and submit an Impact idea for 2024.