Kerry Cleaver

Analysis of Carbon Brief’s Cosmos database reveals the world’s leading “institutions” for climate research. There are more than 40,000 institutions in the Cosmos database, ranging from universities and research laboratories, through to policy institutes and governmental bodies. Carbon Brief has given each institution a “publication count”, by adding up the number of times that its experts appear in the author list of studies in the Cosmos database.

Carbon Brief’s Project Cosmos is the largest known database of climate change research, featuring more than 1.8m individual publications. Every publication has a list of authors – the experts who carried out fieldwork, analysed data and drafted the document itself. Hundreds of thousands of experts are listed as authors in these studies, books and reports. Each publication also has a list of references – the other academic works on which the authors drew to develop their research.

The most highly cited publications in Carbon Brief’s Cosmos database reveal the building blocks supporting so many elements of climate science. Every year, thousands of new scientific documents are published, from studies and reports to books and assessments. Carbon Brief’s Project Cosmos pulls together the “universe” of climate research, spanning 1.8m publications from almost a century of scientific endeavor.