Xindong Wu Appears Twice in List of Highly Cited Researchers

Xindong Wu, director of the School of Computing and Informatics, appears twice, under computer science and engineering, in the Clarivate Analytics' 2017 Highly Cited Researchers List.

Of the 3,300 scholars included on Clarivate Analytics' Highly Cited Researchers list, just 147, including Dr. Xindong Wu, appear in two categories. Wu is an expert in data mining, a field of computer science that extracts useful information from data. "Public and private entities confront huge amounts of data, and they utilize data mining to make sense of it and to inform decisions," Wu said.

Since 1993, Wu has published 450 peer-reviewed articles and conference papers in the fields of data mining, and artificial intelligence and knowledge engineering. Knowledge engineering is a field of artificial intelligence focused on the development of computer systems that simulate human thought and logic.

Clarivate Analytics operates several subscription-based services focused on academic research. The company assembles the annual Highly Cited Researcher list based on citation statistics from its Web of Science database, which indexes how many times a scholar's work has been used by other researchers in their own. The database indexes 169, or about a third, of Wu's publications. But that fraction has been cited more than 5,460 times between 2005 and 2015, and ranks him among the top 1 percent of most-cited scholars in his fields during those 11 years, explained Christopher King, Clarivate Analytics’ editorial content manager. "Such consistent production of highly cited reports indicates that the work of these researchers has been repeatedly judged by their peers to be of notable significance and utility," King said in a company press release.

"Who else is on the list is an indication of the caliber scholar Dr. Wu is," said Dr. Ramesh Kolluru, UL Lafayette’s vice president for Research, Innovation and Economic Development. "The fact that one of our faculty members is on this objective list of global researchers is a matter of great pride and honor for the University. He is a superstar in the area of data science."