For Fourth Straight Year, NJIT Professor Makes Global List of Highly Cited Researchers

A research paper on metal carbides and nitrides is paying dividends for NJIT’s Meng-Qiang Zhao — eight years after it was published.

For the fourth straight year, Zhao, an assistant professor of chemical and materials engineering at NJIT’s Newark College of Engineering, has made Clarivate’s list of Highly Cited Researchers. Why? Chiefly because peers continue to cite the paper, which introduced a faster and safer way to synthesize MXenes, a family of novel 2D transition metal carbides and nitrides, according to Zhao.

MXenes are promising electrode materials for next generation energy storage devices, such as batteries and supercapacitors. In particular, MXenes provide great promise to improve the power density of batteries and the energy density of supercapacitors. This will contribute toward building electric vehicles with longer driving mileages and smartphones with longer usage, while charging much faster. 

Zhao is among five authors of the 2014 paper, which Nature published. At the time, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Drexel University. Zhao, who holds both a bachelor’s and Ph.D. in chemical engineering, joined NJIT in 2020.

When asked how the recognition helps him, Zhao said it “inspires me to continue with attractive research topics and helps to initiate many valuable collaborations.”

Clarivate saluted nearly 7,000 researchers worldwide in its 2022 list, including 2,764 in the United States — the most of any region. The second biggest region was mainland China, with 1,169 honorees, and the third was the United Kingdom, with 579, according to Clarivate.

These highly cited papers rank in the top 1% by citations for a field or fields and publication year in the Web of Science™.

The list draws on data and analysis conducted by bibliometric experts and data scientists at Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information. The papers they considered were published between 2011 and 2021.

“Research fuels the race for knowledge and it is important that nations and institutions celebrate the individuals who drive the wheel of innovation,” said David Pendlebury, head of research analysis at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate. “The Highly Cited Researchers list identifies and celebrates exceptional individual researchers who are having a significant impact on the research community as evidenced by the rate at which their work is being cited by their peers. These individuals are helping to transform human ingenuity into our world’s greatest breakthroughs – and it is an honor to celebrate their achievements.”