Global Research Impact

Based on data from Scopus, the annual top 2% list aims to provide a standardized way to recognize scientists who have made a significant impact in their respective fields. It draws from a variety of citation metrics — including the h-index, co-authorship and adjusted citation counts — to ensure fair and balanced researcher representation. Scientists are classified into 22 broad fields and 176 subfields, and only those who rank in the top 2% of their subfield are included. The 2024 ranking is available for both career-long and single-year impact (through the end of 2023).

GSSW Dean Henrika McCoy states, “Professors Jeff Jenson, Kim Bender and Eugene Walls are exceptional scholars who are also known for being gifted teachers and caring mentors. Their inclusion among the top 2% of social work scientists is testament to the lasting impact GSSW faculty are making on science, and even more importantly, on improving individual lives and transforming communities and the profession of social work.”

The Philip and Eleanor Winn Endowed Professor Emeritus, Jenson’s research focused on the application of a public health approach to preventing child and adolescent health and behavior problems and on the evaluation of preventive interventions aimed at promoting healthy youth development. He has published nine books and numerous articles and chapters on topics related to child and adolescent development and prevention science. Jenson served as a co-lead for the Grand Challenge to Ensure Healthy Development for All Youth, and in 2022, he received the 2022 Distinguished Career Award from the Society for Social Work and Research.

Jenson says, “The need to develop and implement effective and equitable preventive interventions for children and families has never been greater. I am honored to be included in this list and delighted to see that my collaborative work in promoting positive behavioral health in young people is being used by practitioners, policymakers and researchers.”

GSSW’s current Philip and Eleanor Winn Endowed Professor for Children and Youth, Bender focuses her research on young people experiencing homelessness. She is striving to understand their needs, engage them in social-change projects and help them to develop skills that can prevent adverse experiences. She has served as co-PI on a six-state, multi-site research project to better understand risk and protective factors among youth experiencing homelessness. Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, she also served as PI on a three-year randomized trial of a mindfulness-based intervention to prevent victimization and substance among youth in emergency shelters. As a 2023 Fulbright Fellow, Bender studied youth participation and activism in Taiwan.

Walls focuses his research primarily on risk and resilience across the lifespan of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgender and nonbinary communities from an intersectional perspective, as well as the integration of social justice in social work education. Influenced by critical theoretical perspectives — including post-modernism, queer theory, feminist theory and intersectionality theory — and by a social constructivist approach to epistemology, Walls’s most recent endeavor is an edited volume with Cambridge University Press that outlines a decolonial, critical approach to quantitative methodology in social work research. He says, “For too long we have trained emerging social work scholars in quantitative methods-as-usual that fail to live up to our profession’s goals of liberation and equity. Our hope with this new book is to give scholars the needed tools to enable our work to have an even greater impact.”

McCoy states that inclusion in the top 2% list is one of several indicators of GSSW’s research strength. In 2023–24, GSSW researchers had 69 grants totaling $15.4 million in research expenditures — up from $12.8 million the previous year and the most of any division at the University. She says, “Our goal to advance justice extends across the school’s entire academic enterprise, inlcuding its research activities. Professors Jenson, Bender and Walls exemplify justice-focused and community-engaged scholars who strive to translate science into action to benefit the greater good. We are incredibly proud of their accomplishments and impact.”