SIUE’s Dr. Riza Demirer is Listed Among Top 2 Percent of Global Scientists

EDWARDSVILLE - Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Distinguished Research Professor Riza Demirer, PhD, is among the list of the Top 2 Percent of Global Scientists. The recognition, which involves input from Stanford University, is based on metrics surrounding Demirer’s published research.

“I am humbled and appreciative of being recognized for my work by Stanford University and Elsevier,” said Demirer, of the School of Business’ Department of Economics and Finance. “This recognition is very motivating for me. It is a testament to the impact of my research globally, as it shows that my scholarship has an impact that goes well beyond SIUE. Research requires a lot of dedication, sacrifice and self-motivation, and being listed among the top global scientists in a large list of researchers from all fields of science is something that validates my efforts and hard work.”

Research areas for Demirer, include investments, asset pricing, derivatives and risk management, international finance, energy and commodity markets, emerging markets and more recently, climate finance. His teaching focus areas are in financial management, investments, security analysis and valuation, international finance, fixed income securities and derivatives and risk management.

In offering more specifics, Demirer said, “My co-authors include some of the top-level researchers in the world in the areas of macroeconomics, finance, econometrics and data analytics, and my papers employ some of the most recent econometric models developed in the literature.”

“Some of my papers that have attracted attention deal with investor herding and speculative behavior in stock markets,” continued Demirer. “For example, in one paper, I and a coauthor introduced a methodological innovation to standard models by integrating a dynamic, regime switching specification to herding tests, and this attracted a huge amount of interest and citations. In another influential paper, I incorporated asset pricing tests into the energy economics literature, and this has led to quite a few follow up studies that built on my paper. My recent research deals with climate finance, and I am working with colleagues from Europe, Australia and Africa on several interesting topics that deal with the effects of climate uncertainty on stock markets and green assets.”

The list was formulated by Elsevier, a leading academic publishing company, in collaboration with Stanford University, based on the publication and citation metrics for researchers from 22 scientific fields and 174 sub-fields globally, according to Demirer.

“They obtained the information from Scopus, Elsevier’s abstract and citation database, and the list includes close to 10 million scientists from all fields in science, including applied sciences, arts and humanities, natural sciences, health sciences and economic and social sciences,” he explained. “The list is an extremely comprehensive one of scientists all over the world, from all science fields. They then computed a composite score for each scientist and published the top 2% scientists in a recent report on Elsevier’s website.”

The composite score for each researcher focuses on the impact (citations) rather than productivity (number of publications) and incorporates information on co-authorship and author positions (single, first, last author), noted Demirer.

“I work on interesting topics that are of importance for not only academics, but also practitioners and policy makers,” he shared. “I have also had an extremely productive research stream with more than 80 publications since I was promoted to full professor in 2016.”

Demirer’s research has attracted attention from researchers all over the world, which is reflected in his citation metrics. According to Google Scholar, as of October 2023, his published works and working papers have been cited more than 5,000 times by other researchers, indicating the overall impact and significance of his research.

“Research is an integral part of any university, and having SIUE represented in this list is something we should all celebrate,” said Demirer. “This is a great accomplishment for our University and speaks to SIUE’s commitment to research, which eventually makes us better teachers, and I am happy to contribute to it.”

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