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The table above features the top 30 universities and other research organisations in the field of oceanography based on citations to highly cited papers published since 2000. Highly cited papers are defined in the Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators database, from which these statistics derive, as ranking in the top 1 per cent by citations for their field and year of publication. Some 387 oceanography papers were identified as such during the period measured and were cited 35,539 times, an average of 91.83. Thus, the top 18 insti?tutions not only excelled in citation impact but also surpassed the average score for such influential reports.

In terms of the number of highly cited papers and total citations, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute comes first. Ken Buesseler, senior scientist at the institution, whose speciality is marine geochemistry, is the researcher with the greatest number of highly cited papers (10), as well as total citations to those papers (1,558). He is currently monitoring the release of radioactivity from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan.

The nations represented by the 30 institutions include, in rank order: US (17); Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the UK (two each); and Belgium, Japan and Spain (one each).

Oceanography as defined here encompasses many specific disciplines and their journals, including marine biology, limnology, fisheries science, ecology and geophysics. Papers published in multidisciplinary journals such as Science and Nature relating to the discipline were also included in this analysis.

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