In recent years, universities have been ranked according to their publications, the number of Nobel Prize winners working there, etc. Comparing Harvard (over £40 billion in funds, 14,000 employees, but only 23,000 students) to Aix Marseille University (€72 million and 80,000 students, 8,000 staff) is not straightforward. Admittedly, Harvard currently has 42 Nobel Prize winners and 162 since its inception, but many of them were attracted by the prestige of a university that is often ranked among the best in the world. This ranking is used by politicians to assess whether France is doing well or not and to decide how much funding to allocate to universities.
This ranking frenzy has, of course, spread to researchers as well. Research Com, for example, ranks researchers by discipline and according to the number of publications and, above all, citations they have received. The higher the number, the more the researcher is considered to have impacted their field of science. At first glance, this seems logical. However, a technical publication will, by definition, receive many citations, as will a false publication (with or without retraction), thereby reducing the impact of rankings, which are also used by scientific committees to recruit candidates and decide whether to promote scientific researchers and research professors.
Ultimately, what matters is the importance of the concept or observation made and whether it has opened a new field of work. It seems to me that this is the only way to make a serious assessment. Research com has just ranked me as the third most cited French neuroscientist and 211th worldwide – https://research.com/scientists-rankings/neuroscience – in the 2025 edition of the ranking of the best scientists in the field of neuroscience. What I appreciate in this case is that my two most cited articles (more than 62,000 citations in total) are those that are related to my two major discoveries, which are still valid and important because they have led to many innovative studies:
1) the dissection of the mechanisms of temporal lobe epilepsy and its implications for understanding and treating this type of epilepsy (30% of all epilepsy cases), which is among the most drug-resistant. My review published in 1987 on this subject is the third most cited publication since the ranking of publications on epilepsy has existed…
2) the developmental change in the effects of the transmitter GABA, which inhibits adult neurons but excites immature brain neurons due to intracellular changes in chlorine. This is a fundamental mechanism of brain maturation, with GABA playing a major trophic role during brain development thanks to its excitatory effects. This rule has been preserved throughout evolution and validated in all animal species and brain structures, from insects to humans, and published in a dozen journals and hundreds of articles by different teams that have studied this phenomenon. One of my reviews published by Nature Reviews Neuroscience, ‘The developmental excitatory/inhibitory shift of GABA: the nature of the innate and the acquired,’ is widely cited.
