Scholarly Impact of the Week: Top 20 of 2024

Scholarly Impact at Simon Fraser University (SFU) takes many forms: publishing a paper in a high-impact journal, patenting an invention, debuting a new performance piece, publishing a monograph or book, influencing government policy, or changing the way we think about or understand the world. SFU researchers did all this and more in 2024, demonstrating purpose, passion and wide-reaching impact.

Research, innovation and knowledge mobilization for a better world

The Scholarly Impact of the Week series featured the work of over two dozen SFU scholars in 2024. The series covered research on sharks and rays in the depths of the oceans, watermelon snow on the tops of mountains and climate change in Arctic. It explored how we approach experiential education, the way we work and romantic relationships. It shared research that enhanced our understanding of human health and aging, the role of ethnic media and the information age, visited impact from the past, and looked towards future discoveries. Thank you to all the scholars who took time to participate this year.

We are proud to share the top research articles by SFU’s outstanding faculty in 2024. Highlighted below are some of the top-cited academic papers from SFU and scholarly works that topped the Altmetric attention scores.

Please note: These lists 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 2024.     

SFU's 20 top-cited scholarly works of 2024

The 2024 top-cited articles look at the field-weighted citation impact which considers the differences in research behaviour across disciplines.

According to Scopus, fields like 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.

Please note: SFU faculty scholars listed do not include all contributors to each publication. Many of these publications include SFU students and non-SFU authors as well. To view the full list of authors, please visit the link to each article. These data were pulled December 23, 2024 and do not reflect work published after that date.

SFU’s top 20 scholars 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.

Please note that the attention scores are subject to change over time; some items may appear out of order. List compiled on December 6, 2024.

We encourage the SFU research community to submit an Impact idea for 2025. We expect most of these to be recent and completed works, but will also accept suggestions for transformative impacts from the past. For questions or clarification please reach out to vpri-communications@sfu.ca

SFU scholars can also reach out to their faculty communications and marketing team for support sharing their work as an SFU News story or on social channels. They can become SFU media experts or nominate their work for a Scholarly Impact of the Week profile.