Making News

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Last fall, the analytics firm Elsevier listed 14 Barnard College faculty members among the top 2% of the most-cited science authors worldwide. Culled from the company’s science-wide author databases, the list tracks the professors’ expertise in article subjects ranging from household pets to the extraterrestrial. Although the majority of Barnard professors publish each year, the most-cited list highlights high-traffic interests in the press and within academic circles.

Sheri Berman, professor of political science, for example, delved into the use of the term “fascism,” which garnered attention in the final days of the presidential campaign. She was one of many academics noting the ongoing debate among experts on what the word actually means. She told ABC News that use of the term should “help you understand the phenomenon that is being described,” but confusion and mystification cloud its impact.

Meanwhile, Janna Levin, professor of physics and astronomy, weighed in on Dyson spheres, which some fantastical theorists have said could be alien megastructures that harness the power to provide energy to spacefaring civilizations. Levin shared her perspective with Salon, saying the spheres would be better dubbed “Dyson swarms” — a vast collection of solar-energy-collecting satellites, each on independent orbits around the sun. “Any instrument that collects energy wastes some in the form of heat,” she told Salon. “It’s the heat signature that scientists have recently searched for. Heat signatures are so generic in nature that it’s far from a smoking gun, and there are many possible natural explanations.”

And the oft-cited dog expert Alexandra Horowitz, adjunct associate professor of psychology, was quoted in Popular Science on why dogs lick humans. “Your dog’s lick of you when you come home is absolutely a greeting, they’re happy to see you, but also it’s a little bit of a request for whatever you just ate,” she says.

To delve deeper and read more from the top 14, go to barnardbold.net/top2percent.