Allan MacDonald Named Citation Laureate
The annual recognition highlights researchers with extraordinary citation records and societal impact.
Portrait of Dr. Allan McDonald, a National Academy of Sciences fellow in the Department of Physics, College of Natural Sciences. Photographer: Christina S. Murrey, The University of Texas at Austin
Among only 22 exceptional scientists and economists on the new list, Citation Laureates™ 2024, is Allan H. MacDonald, Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair and professor in physics at The University of Texas at Austin.
MacDonald, who in 2020 won the Wolf Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking work in a field known as twistronics, has led research that holds promise for new technologies important in energy and materials science. MacDonald and his colleagues had a major breakthrough while researching an intriguing property of a two-dimensional material called graphene. They found that when graphene is layered at a slight and very specific angle of 1.1 degrees, electrons behave differently. Experimentalists later built on MacDonald’s theory work and found that the so-called “magic angle” produced superconductivity.
“Poised for Nobel recognition” is how Clarivate, the organization behind the list, describes the individuals it identifies. Fewer than two dozen experts, and only 11 in the United States, made the Citation Laureates list for 2024, having demonstrated groundbreaking impact in their fields considered of Nobel stature.
Clarivate reveals its annual list of Citation Laureates in September.
“The Citation Laureates program is a tribute to the visionary minds driving innovation and societal impact across diverse fields of research,” said Emmanuel Thiveaud, Clarivate Senior Vice President for Research & Analytics, Academia & Government. “Their influence, evidenced by their extensive citation records, highlights the significant impact of their work on shaping future discoveries and contributions to societal progress.”
Since analysts began producing the annual list in 2002, they have identified 75 Citation Laureates prior to those individuals being named Nobel Prize winners through a process that draws on on publication and citation data from trusted journals. Out of nearly 61 million articles and proceedings indexed since 1970 in the company’s Web of Science, only 0.01% have been cited more than 2,000 times. Citation Laureates are selected from the authors of this group of papers.
In previous years, dating back a decade, MacDonald was named to lists of “highly cited researchers,” including by Thomson Reuters, which was acquired by Clarivate in 2016.
Adapted from a post by Clarivate.
