Influential: Rupert Baumgartner and Holger Hoff among the highly cited researchers

Rupert Baumgartner (right) is Professor of Sustainability Management and heads the "Christian Doppler Laboratory for Sustainable Product Management enabling a Circular Economy". Holger Hoff develops transdisciplinary formats for research and teaching in the field of excellence "Climate Change Graz", thereby contributing to the application- and demand-oriented focus of projects. Photos: University of Graz/Pichler (left), private/Katharina Wassler

The number of publications in scientific journals is considered to be a measure of a researcher's scientific achievement. How often these works are cited by colleagues provides information about the relevance of the publications. Sustainability researcher Rupert Baumgartner and transdisciplinarity expert Holger Hoff from the University of Graz are among the top 1 per cent of the most cited scientists in their fields of research.

In November 2025, the analytics company Clarivate published its annual list of the “Highly Cited Researchers”. For its latest analysis, Clarivate's Institute for Scientific Information considered scientific papers published and cited between 2014 and 2024. Rupert Baumgartner from the Department of Environmental Systems Sciences and Holger Hoff from the Wegener Center at the University of Graz are among the “Highly Cited Researchers” in the “Cross Field” category. With their interdisciplinary work, they are particularly influential in several scientific fields. In Baumgartner's case, this concerns the areas of corporate and product sustainability, sustainability assessment and digital technologies, while Hoff focuses on the topics of planetary boundaries, resource nexus, sustainability transformation and transdisciplinarity.

In total, Clarivate lists 6,868 Highly Cited Researchers from 60 countries, 54 of them from Austria.

Gudrun Pichler

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