Research by Professor Sin-Wang Chong has been identified among the world’s most impactful publications in the social sciences by Clarivate’s Essential Science Indicators (ESI), one of the most widely used bibliometric benchmarking tools in higher education and research assessment.
While citation counts are one indicator of research visibility rather than a comprehensive measure of scholarly impact or quality, recognition of this kind provides useful evidence that a body of work is being actively engaged with by the international research community.
About the ESI designations
ESI’s Highly Cited Papers are publications that rank in the top 1% globally by citations for their research field and publication year, assessed against the full Web of Science database over a rolling ten-year window. Thresholds are recalculated bimonthly across 22 broad research fields, covering tens of millions of publications worldwide. Top Papers additionally reflect current research engagement, combining citation performance with recent citation activity, identifying work that remains at the forefront of active scholarly debate.
The recognised publications
The first paper, “Reconsidering Student Feedback Literacy from an Ecological Perspective” (Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 2021), is a sole-authored contribution in which Sin-Wang proposed an ecological reconceptualisation of how students engage with academic feedback. The paper has been widely cited across educational research, language education, and higher education studies.
The second, “A Meta Systematic Review of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: A Call for Increased Ethics, Collaboration, and Rigour” (International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2024), is a co-authored work involving an international team of researchers led by Dr Melissa Bond (UCL). The paper provides a systematic synthesis of the AI in higher education literature and has attracted substantial attention since its publication.
Both papers are classified within ESI’s Social Sciences, General category and qualify under both the Top Papers and Highly Cited Papers designations.
Institutional context
According to ESI data, across the 2022–2026 citation window, the University of St Andrews produced 649 papers in the Social Sciences, General category, accumulating 2,687 citations at an average of 4.14 per paper. The institution has five Top Papers and five Highly Cited Papers in this category for this period. Sin-Wang’s two papers account for two of those five in each category, representing 40% of St Andrews’ recognised output at this level in the social sciences for the most recent five-year window.
Source: Clarivate Essential Science Indicators, filtered by Author: CHONG, SW; Research Field: Social Sciences, General. Data accessed May 2026. St Andrews institutional data from InCites ESI Citation Trends, Social Sciences, General, University of St Andrews, 2022–2026 window.