The last decade has seen significant and dramatic advances in fuel cell technology, as researchers have developed commercially viable cells that can efficiently convert hydrogen or hydrocarbon fuels—particularly methane from natural gas—into electricity. Technologies are now in development to power everything from mobile phones and laptops to automobiles and industrial plants. As a result, the list of highly cited fuel cell papers from the past decade is dominated by reviews of the three main technologies that have come to the fore: Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFC), Direct Methanol Fuel Cells (DMFC), and Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cells (PEFC), which are also known as Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells (PEFMC). A second dominant theme in the list is reports on the physical characteristics and properties of anode, cathode, and membrane materials. A third area of note constitutes reports on modeling, management, and diagnostic techniques for maximizing performance.

Methodology

To construct this database, papers were extracted based on title keywords for Fuel Cells. The keywords used were as follows:

fuel cell*

The baseline time span for this database is 1993 - 2003 (first bi-monthly). The resulting database contained 3,073 papers; 4,502 authors; 54 countries; 380 journals; and 1,181 institutions.

Rankings

Once the database was in place, it was used to generate the lists of top 20 papers, authors, journals, institutions, and nations, covering a time span of 1993 - 2003 (first bi-monthly).

The top 20 papers are ranked according to total cites. Rankings for author, journal, institution, and country are listed in three ways: according to total cites, total papers, and total cites/paper. The paper thresholds used to determine scientist, institution, country, and journal rankings according to total cites/paper were as follows: 18, 12, 20, and 12, respectively.

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