GTU Faculty Member's Paper Achieves 'Highly Cited' Status

The paper titled “Agronomic Biofortification of Cereals with Zinc: a Review”, which has been co-authored by GTU Faculty Member Ümit Barış Kutman (PhD), Vice Director, Institute of Biotechnology, GTU, and Prof. İsmail Çakmak (PhD), Faculty Member, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Sabancı University, and was published in the SCI-Indexed European Journal of Soil Science in January 2018, has recently achieved both the “Highly Cited Paper” and “Hot Paper” statuses based on data received from Web of Science Essential Science Indicators.

According to Web of Science Essential Science Indicators, the status of “Highly Cited Paper” and of “Hot Paper” are special statuses that are assigned to academic papers based on how many times they are cited over what period of time and on some other criteria unique to the academic discipline in question. For more information please click on the following link: https://images.webofknowledge.com/images/help/WOS/hs_citation_applications.html

The papers that gain the “Hot Paper” status are the ones that achieve to be placed among the top influential 0.1% by getting published in the last 2 years and cited many times in a very short period of time.

As of July 2018, the aforementioned paper is the only "Hot Paper" to have been published on Web of Science in 2018 with all its authors based in Turkey. Furthermore, when the Web of Science data is examined without the "year published" option selected, it can be seen that there are only 55 Hot Papers here with at least one of its authors is based in Turkey and the paper in question among others is the only such one in the field of Agricultural Sciences.

"Agronomic Biofortification of Cereals with Zinc: a Review" is a paper on "biofortification", which is one of Ümit Barış Kutman's fields of specialization, among the others of which are plant physiology, plant nutrition, global food safety, sustainable agriculture and plant biotechnology. Biofortification means the improvement of nutrititional value of food using biotechnological methods and is accepted as the most effective and sustainable method for fighting mineral and vitamin deficiencies, which commonly affects approximately 2 billion people around the world including Turkey and causes very serious health problems and deaths. In this sense, related research is focused mostly on minerals such as zinc, iron, iodine, and selenium and Vitamin A, and in this paper, Prof. Kutman particularly focuses on the biofortification of cereals with zinc using agricultural methods and thus improving public health.