North America’s authors behind the Top Cited Papers
Discover in-depth interviews with a selection of North America’s most cited researchers – individuals whose research has not only received a Top Cited Paper award, but has also significantly impacted their respective fields.
See the full list of winners: Top Cited Papers from North America
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Innovative Bio-Inspired Robotics: Insights from Dr. Carl H. White
Dr. Carl H. White from the University of Virginia discusses their research on Tunabot Flex, a robotic system inspired by yellowfin tuna, designed to study how body flexibility affects high-performance swimming.
Read their award winning article: Tunabot Flex: a tuna-inspired robot with body flexibility improves high-performance swimming
Congratulations on your Top Cited Paper Award! How does it feel to have your work
recognized in this way?
This award is a great honor, and I am grateful for each author who chooses to include our work in their important research. In our paper, we designed and tested a research platform based on tuna to close the performance gap between robotic and biological systems. Using this platform, termed Tunabot Flex, we demonstrated the role of body flexibility in high-performance swimming. The interdisciplinary collaboration between our two universities was fundamental to the success of this project. This award speaks to the ongoing impact of our work, and I am humbled that so many others find our work useful.
What role do you believe citations play in the broader dissemination and impact of
research?
Citations sequentially link our shared knowledge by recognizing past research. Like a coral
reef, scientific knowledge grows in irregular, interconnected structures that are influenced by
their environment. Tracing citations from one paper to another provides transparency into the
origins of ideas and their development. Similarly, our work built upon the excellent research
of those before us. Citations also generally indicate the scientific impact of a paper. A well-cited paper is more likely to be a node from which new areas of research grow. I appreciate
the recognition of our work, and I hope it continues to serve as a helpful stepping stone for
others along their path.
Have you noticed any trends in the types of researchers or institutions that cite your
work?
Papers that investigated bio-inspired underwater robots, especially fish-like ones, account for nearly all of our paper’s citations thus far. This trend comes as no surprise given its relevance to our tuna-inspired research platform. Many of these papers focused on the engineering and performance of their designs. Other papers did this while also utilizing their system to explore aspects of fish swimming. This was our approach with Tunabot Flex as we explored the role of body flexibility in high-performance swimming. Some papers that cited our work were also strictly biological in scope. Each of these approaches is necessary for advancing the field of bio-inspired robotics and is exciting in its own right.
Can you share any interesting or unexpected citations your paper has received?
The papers that cited our work investigated a variety of topics, but we expected this diversity because of the interdisciplinary nature of our work between engineers and biologists. Several interesting papers illustrate the breadth of subject matter: a turtle-inspired robot (Baines et al., Nature, 2022), shark skin surfaces (Gabler-Smith & Lauder, Frontiers in Marine Science, 2022), fish schools (Ko et al., Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 2023), and manta-like swimming (Menzer et al., Biomimetics, 2022). Our paper is just one example of the many studies benefitting from the rich cross-pollination of ideas to new contexts.
What advice would you give to researchers looking to maximize the impact and citations of their work?
My advice to researchers looking to maximize their work’s impact is to focus on a novel idea that addresses a significant need. Innovative work fills gaps in existing literature, so you must identify a gap and then characterize its presence. Show how your work is groundbreaking by thoroughly placing it within the context of your field. For our work, we identified the need for a robust way to explore aspects of high-performance fish swimming, especially body flexibility. Tunabot Flex enabled us to do so by accessing high speeds with high tail-beat frequencies while also quantifying efficiency. We rigorously compared our results directly against biological data, which improved our understanding of both biological and bio-inspired systems.
NANOGrav’s Groundbreaking Journey: Insights from authors of a Top Cited Paper
Sarah Vigeland and Dr Stephen Taylor discuss their experiences and insights on their award winning article from the NANOGrav Collaboration. Highlighting their ground breaking work on gravitational wave signals and the resulting global impact and recognition.
Read their article: The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-wave Background
Congratulations on your Top Cited Paper Award! How does it feel to have your work recognized in this way?
This is an incredible validation of the hard work of the entire NANOGrav Collaboration, who persisted over more than 15 years in the search for gravitational wave signals at wavelengths of lightyears. It is wonderful to see this field growing so much now.
Can you share any interesting or unexpected citations your paper has received?
We’ve had huge interest and engagement from the high-energy theory and cosmology communities, who seek to interpret this gravitational-wave background signal as partially due to early-Universe phenomena. A welcome surprise!
Have any of these citations led to new research collaborations or opportunities?
We’ve had interactions with people who are interested in using our data and data products – primarily the gravitational wave background spectrum, so that they can compare it to their theoretical models. We’ve also seen a big increase in the number of people applying to be members of NANOGrav, and these new members are coming from diverse scientific backgrounds and from all over the world.
What role do you believe citations play in the broader dissemination and impact of research?
Research is not impactful because of its citations, but rather attracts citations because of its impact and importance. Nevertheless, a high citation count does signal to others that a paper is relevant and worth reading, which will attract broader audiences and new attention.
Have you noticed any trends in the types of researchers or institutions that cite your work?
We’re seeing people from all over the world applying to join NANOGrav, so we’re no longer just a North American scientific community, but a global one. Many new researchers applying tend to come from backgrounds in high-energy physics or cosmology, which are communities we have not traditionally had many members in before.
What advice would you give to researchers looking to maximize the impact and citations of their work?
Don’t make that your primary goal. Choose interesting problems that you are passionate about, then find out the ways in which other researchers may be interested in the same problem.
What do you think are the key factors that make a research paper highly citable?
An interesting problem that intersects a variety of different disciplines will attract a broad readership, and make it more likely for researchers to cite a paper.
How you can get involved
Visit our journal list and submit your next article if you are a North American researcher looking for the opportunity to be awarded with one of our Top Cited Paper awards.