Martin Harmer, Prolific Citations Award

Martin Harmer, the Alcoa Foundation Professor of materials science and engineering and director of the Materials Research Center, has been designated a “Highly Cited Researcher” by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), a Philadelphia-based organization that has indexed the world’s scholarly literature in science and social science for 40
years.

Harmer, a specialist in ceramic powder processing and the microstructure and properties of advanced structural and electronic ceramic materials, has written more than 200 published articles and received several patents. His articles have been cited more than 2,000 times in articles by other researchers.

ISI says the Highly Cited Researchers make up less than one-half of one percent of all publishing researchers. The organization’s most recent list covers scientific developments in the last 20 years and can be seen at IHighlyCited.com. Harmer’s category is “Materials Science.”

ISI says its source data for the last two decades include 19 million articles and almost 5 million author names in 21 categories representing a wide range of subjects in science and social science.

“Citation is a key measure of influence in science and technology, because it is a highly informed interaction,” the organization says. “When one researcher refers to the work of another, he is, in essence,acknowledging the influence that work has had on his own. There is no better set of experts regarding ground-breaking work than the community
of researchers in a field.”

Harmer’s inclusion in the list of Highly Cited Researchers comes two years after an ISI survey ranked Lehigh fifth among the top 100 federally funded U.S. universities in terms of the average number of citations per paper published in chemical engineering journals