The ranking is done by the total number of journal publications indexed in the Web of Science database per researcher.
The area of “Industry 4.0 (I4.0)-driven operations and supply chains for the circular economy (CE)”, which is the intersection of I4.0, CE, supply chain management (SCM) and quantitative techniques, is an emerging research arena.
– Last year, I was ranked 1st among the top authors in the area of “big data analytics in manufacturing”, which was more about I4.0, but this time was more about connecting I4.0 with CE and SCM. CE is one of the core businesses of my division EnvTech, and that’s the whole reason that I’m here since EnvTech wanted my expertise in digitalisation and smart technologies and apply them to, e.g. CE area, explains Senior Associate Professor Yang Liu at the Division of Environmental Technology and Management, Department of Management and Engineering, Linköping University.
– This intersection field is a definitely hot research topic, especially since it is broadly related to digitalisation, CE, and sustainability, in which Sweden is a leading country. But for the top 10 contributing countries in Fig. 3, Sweden is not there, so just my contributions alone are not enough, and there should be more researchers in Sweden to contribute in this area too.
Why is this important to you as a researcher and to LiU?
– Right now, I’m sitting at the University of Toulouse for a one-month exchange, which directly resulted from one of my publications. Then we start talking about collaborations between the two universities. People start to know LiU from a primary source that they read some interesting publications. This is particularly the case when I meet many new researchers for the first time, e.g. in conferences, they almost always start, “oh, I read many of your papers”. This can surely bring a lot of publicity for LiU worldwide, especially since I took the No.1 place in both bibliometric analyses, and people tend to remember it. This will also help LiU in all kinds of global ranking lists since publications and citations are a crucial part of the ranking formulas.