NUS Don ranks first in listing of prominent human geographers

05 Jan 2010

NUS Department of Geography Prof Henry Yeung was ranked first in the listing of top 50 cited human geographers in the Journal of Economic Geography (Volume 10), placing him in the ranks of prominent human geographers such as Nigel Thrift, Peter Taylor, Billie Turner and Michael Goodchild. One of the key objectives of the ranking is to assess the relative importance of different specialties in human geography, marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of central place theory in 1958 that ushered the beginning of the “quantitative revolution” in this field of study.

A total of 341 well cited geographers were rated based on their respective age-weighted h-indices which measures the geographer's impact on the current pattern of influential research within the discipline. Unlike the regular h-index that measures the scientific productivity and impact of a scientist, the age-weighted h-index is calculated from the ratio of the average age of published work within each author’s index and the overall mean age (of the author’s work as measured in the h-index) for all authors.

Sharing his thoughts on being ranked first in the listing, Prof Yeung said: “I feel deeply honoured that my research work on Asia, based in NUS, has a small place in Anglo-American geography. The discipline has indeed come a very long way since the “quantitative revolution” in the 1960s.”

Winner of the NUS Outstanding Research Award (2008) and Outstanding University Researcher Award (1998), Prof Yeung's research achievements include pioneering the development of the theory of globalisation and global production networks (GPNs) within the discipline of Geography and wider social sciences. With almost 1,000 papers in the ISI Web of Science citing his work, Prof Yeung was also ranked 195th among 3,875 highly-cited social scientists in the world and is the author/co-author of five highly cited papers in leading journals according to the ISI Essential Science Indicators. Currently, Prof Yeung is working with an international team of researchers to unravel the complex organisation of GPNs in contemporary globalisation. This area of research was ranked third Top Research Fronts in the Social Sciences according to Times Higher Education in April 2009.

In the course of his career, Prof Yeung has garnered several awards and accolades such as the Fulbright Foreign Researcher Award (2003) and the Outstanding Overseas Research Award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China (2006). He also serves on the editorial advisory boards of 14 internationally refereed journals and he is the editor of three top journals, namely, Economic Geography, Environment and Planning A. and Review of International Political Economy.