Cyclodextrins have been in the focus of chemistry for decades. Behind the knowledge of cyclodextrin science are a few hundred researchers who have devoted much of their careers to it. We wanted to honour them with a “wall of pride”: a list of cyclodextrin researchers who also rank among the world’s most-cited scientists.
This post explains how we built the list, where it might be weak, and how you can help us fix it.
The idea
Two public resources already exist, but neither answers our question alone:
- The Elsevier/Stanford “Top 2% Scientists” database ranks scientists by a composite citation indicator (c-score). It tells us who is highly cited, but it assigns only broad fields, such as Organic Chemistry or Pharmacology & Pharmacy. There is no topic called “cyclodextrin”.
- OpenAlex, an open bibliographic database, can tell us who publishes on cyclodextrins, but not who is in the top 2%.
So we combined them.
Methodology
- Finding the cyclodextrin authors. We queried OpenAlex for all works with “cyclodextrin” in the title (about 47,000 authors were involved) and grouped them by author. We took the 200 authors with the most such papers.
- Matching to the top 2% list. We compared these names with the career-long 2025 edition of the Top 2% dataset (nearly 244,000 scientists). Names were normalised (accents, hyphens and capitalisation removed). A match required the same surname and the same first name. Where only the first initial agreed, or several scientists fit one name, we did not guess. Those cases were put in a separate “uncertain” group.
- Handling duplicates. Some authors have several OpenAlex profiles (for example, different spellings or a name written in Japanese characters). Where we could link them to a single person, we merged the profiles and added up the paper counts.
- Ranking. Authors were ordered by their number of cyclodextrin-titled papers. For each author we kept the institution, country, h-index, citations without self-citations, c-score and the subfield assigned in the Top 2% dataset.
The result: of the 200 most prolific cyclodextrin authors, 70 were matched unambiguously to the Top 2% list, 39 were uncertain, and 88 were not found in it.
What the list is not
We want to be upfront about the limitations.
- Paper counts are absolute, not shares. A scientist with 70 cyclodextrin papers might have written 70 or 700 papers in total. We cannot yet say that cyclodextrins are someone’s main topic, only that they have published a lot about them. A proper measure would divide by each author’s total output, and that is a next step.
- Title search misses papers. Works that deal with cyclodextrins but do not mention them in the title are not counted, and neither are authors beyond the top 200.
- Name matching is imperfect. Common names (especially short Chinese, Korean or Western names) are hard to disambiguate. Spelling variants can cause missed matches. “Not found” usually means “not in the top 2%”, but it can also mean “name not matched”.
- The Top 2% list has its own limits. It is based on citation metrics, which vary by field and age, and it is updated only periodically.
A note on how this was made
The analysis was carried out together with Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic. Claude queried the databases, wrote the matching code and produced the tables. We believe in transparency here: an AI can speed up work like this enormously, but it can also make plausible-looking mistakes, such as a wrong name match or an overlooked profile. Every entry should be treated as a claim to be checked, not as a settled fact.
Help us get it right
A wall of pride is only worth something if it is accurate. We are counting on you, the readers, to correct it. If you notice any of the following, please tell us:
- a scientist who is missing, or who is listed but does not belong;
- a wrong affiliation, country or spelling of a name;
- two profiles that belong to the same person (or one that was wrongly merged);
- someone whose main research topic is cyclodextrins, but who is absent because the title search missed their work.
Write to us by leaving a comment below. Please include a link to a profile or publication list where possible. We will update the wall regularly and credit those who send corrections.
Cyclodextrin science is a community effort, and so should be its wall of pride.
Here is a simplified list of the top 2% cyclodextrin chemists found by the above algorithm, but listed here randomized, not by c-score!
| Uekama, Kaneto | Sojo University |
| Hirayama, Fumitoshi | Sojo University |
| Harada, Akira | The University of Osaka |
| Ueno, Akihiko | Institute of Science Tokyo |
| Arima, Hidetoshi | Kumamoto University |
| Loftsson, Thorsteinn | Haskoli Islands |
| Trotta, Francesco | Università degli Studi di Torino |
| Szente, Lajos | CycloLab Cyclodextrin Research & Development Laboratory, Ltd. |
| Irie, Tetsumi | Kumamoto University |
| Higashi, Taishi | Kumamoto University |
| Ritter, Helmut | Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz |
| Uyar, Tamer | Cornell University |
| Fenyvesi, Éva | CycloLab Cyclodextrin Research & Development Laboratory, Ltd. |
| Lincoln, Stephen F. | The University of Adelaide |
| Armstrong, Daniel Wayne | The University of Texas at Arlington |
| Saenger, Wolfram Am | Freie Universität Berlin |
| Komiyama, Makoto | University of Tokyo, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology |
| Crommen, Jacques | Université de Liège |
| Jin, Zhengyu Yu | Jiangnan University |
| Tonelli, Alan E. | NC State University |
| Fillet, Marianne | Université de Liège |
| Otagiri, Masaki | Sojo University |
| Liu, Yu | Peking University |
| Takashima, Yoshinori | The University of Osaka |
| Cavalli, Roberta I. | Università degli Studi di Torino |
| Easton, Christopher J. | The Australian National University |
| Cravotto, Giancarlo | Università degli Studi di Torino |
| Sollogoub, Matthieu | Sorbonne Université |
| Wenz, Gerhard | Universität des Saarlandes |
| Yui, Nobuhiko | Institute of Science Tokyo |
| Crini, Grégorio | Laboratoire Chrono-Environnement |
| Szejtli, József | CycloLab Cyclodextrin Research & Development Laboratory, Ltd. |
| Warner, Isiah M. | Louisiana State University |
| Kano, Koji | Doshisha University |
| Harata, Kazuaki | National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology |
| Ravoo, Bart Jan | University of Münster |
| Mele, Andrea | Politecnico di Milano |
| Chankvetadze, Bezhan G. | Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University |
| Alvarez-Lorenzo, Carmen Isabel | Universidade de Santiago de Compostela |
| Stoddart, James Fraser | Department of Chemistry, Zhejiang University |
| Tabushi, Iwao | Kyoto University |
| Matsui, Yoshio | National Institute for Materials Science |
| Cserháti, Tibor | Chemical Research Center, Budapest |
| Caira, Mino R. | University of Cape Town |
| Schurig, Volker | Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen |
| Duchêne, Dominique | Université Paris-Saclay |
| Veiga, Francisco José B.Baptista | Universidade de Coimbra |
| Concheiro, Angel | Facultade de Farmacia |
| Bilensoy, Erem | Hacettepe Üniversitesi |
| Ng, Siu Choon | Singapore Institute of Technology |
| Braga, Susana Santos | Universidade de Aveiro |
| Ueda, Haruhisa | Hoshi University |
| Bols, Mikael | Københavns Universitet |
| Hirai, Hidefumi | Tokyo University of Science |
| Wilson, Lee D. | University of Saskatchewan |
| Roy, Mahendra Nath | University of North Bengal |
| Zhang, Heng | Huazhong University of Science and Technology |
| Reinhoudt, David N. | MESA+ Instituut |
| Shuang, Shaomin | Shanxi University |
| Cabral-Marques, Helena Maria | Faculdade de Farmácia da Universidade de Lisboa |
| Scriba, Gerhard K.E. | Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena |
| Ooya, Tooru | Graduate School of Medicine |
| Pitha, Josef | National Institutes of Health (NIH) |
| Breslow, Ronald | Columbia University |
| Brewster, Marcus Eli | Pharmaceutical Development and Manufacturing Sciences |
| Stefánsson, Einar | Haskoli Islands |
| Dong, Chuan | Shanxi University |
| Mamba, Bhekie B. | University of South Africa |
| Kamachi, Mikiharu | The University of Osaka |
| Sortino, Salvatore | Università degli Studi di Catania |
The full analysis list with statistical data can be downloaded here: