An Oft-Cited Man

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Winter 2005

In May 1997, the journal Nature published a scientific article that put a dollar value on the world's ecosystems: approximately $33 trillion per year at the time.

Traditional economists were skeptical. But eight years later, environmental policy is developed based partly on the economic value of wetlands and tropical rainforests. And that paper, The Value of the World's Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital, co-authored by the University of Vermont's Robert Costanza ranks as the second most highly cited work on the environment and ecology in the past 10 years, according to the Thomson Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which tracks the number of times an article is referenced by other scientists in their published work.

The Nature article had been cited 530 times as of August 2004. But Costanza is no one-hit wonder. The director of UVM's Gund Institute for Ecological Economics has published 368 papers on a variety of topics, which have been cited more than 2,500 times in journals such as Science, Nature and Ecological Economics.