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Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) Scholarly Impact of the Week series celebrates the work of SFU researchers, while raising their profile and mobilizing their research impact. Since its inception in 2021, the series has featured the work of more than 80 SFU scholars from all eight faculties. Thank you to all the faculty and staff members who have collaborated with us to make this possible.

Throughout 2022, SFU scholars continued to make breakthrough scientific discoveries that are transforming their disciplines, benefitting our communities and broadening our understanding of the planet. They have advanced strategies in climate change mitigation and adaption, kept us healthy and informed in a post-COVID world, and mobilized their research in the classroom and into the cosmos. In every discipline, SFU researchers contribute valuable knowledge about the multifaceted and changing world around us.
 

Thank you to all who participated in the Scholarly Impact of the Week series in 2022. We should be very proud of the diverse scope and reach of the research enterprise at SFU. I am excited to see what new discoveries we will make in 2023 and the positive impact it will have on the world. We wish the entire SFU community a wonderful upcoming holiday season.

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


Our weekly impact series featured advancements in climate research and climate action from scholars like Alison Shaw, Glyn Williams-Jones and Kirsten Zickfeld. We explored vital reconciliation work with Eldon Yellowhorn.

We joined researchers such as Jonathan Moore, Anne Salomon, Ailene MacPherson and Leah Bendell on their investigative journeys into the natural environment. We highlighted cutting-edge breakthroughs in computing technology from Jiangchuan Liu and Stephanie Simmons. Researchers like David Vocadlo, Julian Guttman and Scott Lear contributed important insights into the understanding of health and disease.

We have highlighted below just some of the scholarly works that topped the Altmetric attention scores and the top-cited academic papers from SFU. Here is a snapshot of the top 22 publications of 2022—in both the traditional and Altmetric top-cited rating systems.


Please note: These data were pulled December 1, 2022 and do not reflect work published after that date.
 

SFU's top-cited articles of 2022

On average, SFU researchers publish 2,600 journal articles per year, over 40% of which appear in the world's top 10% journals. The 2022 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% 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.

  SFU Scholar* Faculty Publications Field-weighted Citation Impact Number of Citations
 1 Hasina Samji Faculty of Health Sciences Review: Mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on children and youth – a systematic review 78.74 83
 2 Jian Pei  Faculty of Applied Sciences Heterogeneous global graph neural networks for personalized session-based recommendation 44.19 7
 3 Jiangchuan Liu  Faculty of Applied Sciences Partial Computation Offloading and Adaptive Task Scheduling for 5G-Enabled Vehicular Networks 35.1 68
 4 Jennifer Wong Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Examining the effects of teen dating violence prevention programs: a systematic review and meta-analysis 22.29 13
 5 Leyland Pitt Beedie School of Business The circular economy meets artificial intelligence (AI): understanding the opportunities of AI for reverse logistics 19.4 18
 6 Juan Pablo Alperin  Faculty of Communication, Art & Technology Communicating Scientific Uncertainty in an Age of COVID-19: An Investigation into the Use of Preprints by Digital Media Outlets 18.8 22
 7 Jie Liang Faculty of Applied Sciences Laplacian Pyramid Dense Network for Hyperspectral Pansharpening 17.54 16
 8 Siyuan Yin Faculty of Communication, Art & Technology Re-articulating feminisms: a theoretical critique of feminist struggles and discourse in historical and contemporary China 17.48 7
 9 Douglas Allen Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Covid-19 Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature 16.73 27
10 Charlotte Waddell Faculty of Health Sciences Prevalence of childhood mental disorders in high-income countries: A systematic review and meta-analysis to inform policymaking 15.21 15
11 Alexandra Lysova Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Internal and External Barriers to Help Seeking: Voices of Men Who Experienced Abuse in the Intimate Relationships 14.58 16
12 Ron Wakkary Faculty of Communication, Art & Tech Weaving Stories: Toward Repertoires for Designing Things 13.71 3
 13 Xing-Dong Yan Faculty of Applied Sciences Body-Centric NFC: Body-Centric Interaction with NFC Devices Through Near-Field Enabled Clothing 13.71 3
14 Theodore Cosco Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Overcoming Barriers for Older Adults to Maintain Virtual Community and Social Connections during the COVID-19 Pandemic 12.17 11
15 Rylan Simpson Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Public assessments of police during the COVID-19 pandemic: the effects of procedural justice and personal protective equipment 11.76 6
16 Travis Salway Faculty of Health Sciences “They Want You to Kill Your Inner Queer but Somehow Leave the Human Alive”: Delineating the Impacts of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and Expression Change Efforts 10.79 6
17 Christopher Napier Faculty of Science The Association Between Running Injuries and Training Parameters: A Systematic Review 10.77 6
18 Ailene MacPherson Faculty of Science Unifying Phylogenetic Birth-Death Models in Epidemiology and Macroevolution 10.75 9
19 Jian Pei  Faculty of Applied Sciences Multiple Choice Questions based Multi-Interest Policy Learning for Conversational Recommendation 10.65 2
20 Vicki Marlatt Faculty of Science A cross-species comparative approach to assessing multi- and transgenerational effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals 10.54 13
21 Jeffrey Warren Faculty of Science Free Energies of Proton-Coupled Electron Transfer Reagents and Their Applications 10.5 37
22 Michael Howlett Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Designing social policies: Design spaces andcapacity challenges 10.41 1

Altmetric: What made headlines and caught our attention


SFU research made headlines in 2022, with our scholars and their work enjoying a consistent media presence. Distinguished SFU Professor of psychology Lara Aknin chaired The Lancet’s Mental Health & Wellbeing Task Force, whose article on lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic was mentioned on Twitter over 11,000 times. Health sciences professor Bruce Lanphear has four articles in the Altmetric top 22. He was mentioned globally in the media over 650 times for his research on environmental toxins, including his work with The Lancet Commission on pollution and health.

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.

  SFU Scholars* Faculty Publications Altmetric Attention Score
1 Lara Aknin Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic

Also from Lara Aknin:
6596
2 Bruce Lanphear Faculty of Health Sciences Pollution and health: a progress update


Also from Bruce Lanphear:

6118
3 Scott Lear  Faculty of Health Sciences Association of Sitting Time With Mortality and Cardiovascular Events in High-Income, Middle-Income, and Low-Income Countries

Also from Scott Lear:
1074
4 Nicholas Dulvy Faculty of Science Seventy years of tunas, billfishes, and sharks as sentinels of global ocean health 722
5 Kirsten Zickfeld Faculty of Environment Temporary nature-based carbon removal can lower peak warming in a well-below 2 °C scenario 678
6 Isabelle Côté Faculty of Science A global horizon scan of issues impacting marine and coastal biodiversity conservation 673
7 Michael Richards Faculty of Environment A Neandertal dietary conundrum: Insights provided by tooth enamel Zn isotopes from Gabasa, Spain 651
8 Kiffer Card, Hasina Samji, Robert Hogg Faculty of Health Sciences The 2021 Western North American heat dome increased climate change anxiety among British Columbians: Results from a natural experiment 505
9 Brumme, Zabrina Faculty of Health Sciences SARS CoV-2 mRNA vaccination exposes latent HIV to Nef-specific CD8+ T-cells 416
10 Molly Cairncross Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Early Postinjury Screen Time and Concussion Recovery 393
11 Levon Pogosian Faculty of Science Imprints of cosmological tensions in reconstructed gravity 383
12 Victoria Claydon Faculty of Science Diagnosis and treatment of orthostatic hypotension 329
13 Leithen M'Gonigle Faculty of Science Climate change winners and losers among North American bumblebees 302
14 Bruce Lanphear, Lawrence McCandless, Ryan Allen Faculty of Health Sciences Portable HEPA Filter Air Cleaner Use during Pregnancy and Children’s Cognitive Performance at Four Years of Age: The UGAAR Randomized Controlled Trial 300
15 David Hik Faculty of Science Global maps of soil temperature 279
16 Doug Stead, Brent Ward, John Clague Faculty of Science The 28 November 2020 Landslide, Tsunami, and Outburst Flood – A Hazard Cascade Associated With Rapid Deglaciation at Elliot Creek, British Columbia, Canada 268
17 Vicki Marlatt, Jonathan Moore Faculty of Science Risks of mining to salmonid-bearing watersheds 267
18 David Vocadlo Faculty of Science Chemoproteomic identification of CO2-dependent lysine carboxylation in proteins 244
19 Tammara Soma Faculty of Environment Research priorities for global food security under extreme events 244
20 Shih En Lu, Dongwoo Kim, Alexander Karaivanov, Hitoshi Shigeoka Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences COVID-19 vaccination mandates and vaccine uptake 236
21 Michael Thewalt, Stephanie Simmons Faculty of Science Optical observation of single spins in silicon 229
22 Jonathan Moore Faculty of Science Low summer river flows associated with low productivity of Chinook salmon in a watershed with shifting hydrology 221

* 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. 

We encourage the SFU research community to engage with us and submit an Impact idea for 2023.