Geography and Environment in the 2026 Stanford/Elsevier rankings

Eleven members of LSE’s Department of Geography and Environment are among the world’s most cited scientists in the latest Stanford/Elsevier update. For students, the lesson is simpler than any league table: the people writing the literature are the people teaching it, and the conversation runs both ways.

The Department of Geography and Environment has eleven scholars in this year’s Stanford/Elsevier rankings, which measure citation impact during 2025. The rankings assess more than 11.6 million scientists worldwide and list only about 2% of them.

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose is LSE’s highest-ranked researcher and the only one in the world’s top 500. He stands 441st across all disciplines, up from 685th a year ago. For the fifth year running, he is first among more than 15,000 researchers in urban and regional planning.

Eric Neumayer, Michael Storper and Vernon Henderson join him in the global top 5,000. Neil Lee, Riccardo Crescenzi and Hyun Bang Shin are within the top 50,000. Stephen Gibbons, the late Sylvia Chant, Simon Dietz and Elizabeth Robinson complete a list that sits entirely within the world’s top 100,000.

More than 150 LSE researchers appear this year, up from 147 last year. The Department of Geography and Environment supplies about one in fourteen of them, but a third of the twelve LSE scholars in the global top 5,000. Three of the School’s ten highest-ranked researchers belong to the department.

Rankings measure research. Their most valuable dividend, however, is paid in the classroom. In Geography and Environment, the research frontier is not a distant place reached through a reading list. It is on the third and fourth floors of the Cheng Kin Ku Building in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Students meet arguments while they are still being contested, often taught by the people contesting them. New findings reach the seminar room before they reach the textbook. Dissertations and doctoral theses are supervised by scholars who know where the literature is heading, because they are the ones moving it. Graduates leave knowing not just what is known but how to find out what is not.

The rankings also show how wide that frontier runs. The database sorts scientists into subfields. The department’s eleven span five: urban and regional planning, geography, economics, development studies and environmental economics. Seven rank among the top 100 in their subfield worldwide.

Storper is 22nd among more than 21,000 researchers in geography, Chant 46th in development studies and Neumayer 83rd among more than 54,000 economists. Much of the frontier of the social sciences lies where disciplines meet: economics and place, environment and policy, cities and development. The department has made a habit of working on those borders.

The questions make the point better than the numbers. Why do prosperous economies breed discontent in the places they leave behind? Can growth be measured from outer space? Why do natural disasters take a heavier toll on women than on men? How should the costs of climate change be weighed against the costs of tackling it? Who gains and who loses when cities gentrify?

Colleagues in the department have helped to frame these questions and, in several cases, to answer them. Their students work on them while the answers are still being written.

Citation metrics are blunt instruments. They measure attention rather than insight. But attention on this scale is hard to win and harder to keep. A department does not place eleven scholars across five subfields by chance.

Nor does the traffic run in one direction. The seminar room is where ideas meet their first demanding audience. Through their discussions, their contributions in class and their debates, students test arguments before any referee does. In the process, they help to shape how some of the world’s most cited scholars think. Arguments that survive a roomful of sharp students tend to reach the journals in better shape.

Students in the department are therefore not only learning frontier science. They are helping to shape it. Written here, taught here and, thanks to them, rethought here. The formula is simple, and the evidence suggests it works.

Background

The Stanford/Elsevier database is compiled by a team led by John P.A. Ioannidis of Stanford University with Elsevier. It ranks scientists by a composite indicator combining:

• total citations
• the h-index
• a co-authorship-adjusted hm-index
• citations to papers by authorship position

The August 2026 update (version 9) uses Scopus data as of 1 August 2026. It covers more than 11.6 million scientists with at least five papers indexed in Scopus. This figure is the sum of the 174 subfield populations reported in the data. The single-year list reflects citations received in 2025 and includes 249,310 scientists: the top 100,000 by composite score plus anyone in the top 2% of their subfield. Ranks quoted here exclude self-citations.

The data are available at https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/9