8:20 a.m., Feb. 18, 2009----A paper authored by two faculty members in the University of Delaware's Department of Mechanical Engineering has been cited more than 900 times since its publication in 2001.

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The paper's authors are Tsu-Wei Chou, Pierre S. du Pont Chair of Engineering, and Erik Thostenson, assistant professor of mechanical engineering. Both are also affiliated with UD's Center for Composite Materials.

Published by Elsevier in Composites Science and Technology, “Advances in the Science and Technology of Carbon Nanotubes and Their Composites: A Review” is the most cited paper among all composites journal articles indexed by the online database Scopus, which also powers the site TopCited.com.

Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources, covering over 16,000 peer-reviewed journals from more than 4,000 publishers.

Among journals that cover the areas of materials, macromolecules and polymers in addition to composites, the paper is the eighth most cited on a list that comprises some 467,000 articles from 2001 onwards.

“Your paper has indeed made a tremendous impact in the literature,” Rumen Duhlev, publisher at Elsevier, wrote recently in an email to Chou. “Congratulations!”

Chou and Thostenson have been working together in the area of nanotube-based composites for several years. “It is humbling that so many other researchers have read our paper and also cited it in their own research,” said Thostenson. “The breadth of journals where the citing papers have been published really shows the interdisciplinary nature of the field of nanocomposites.”

According to Chou, other authors among those papers near the top of the list include several winners of UD's Medal of Excellence in Composite Materials. The Medal is awarded by UD's Center for Composite Materials and honors those who have achieved outstanding leadership in the field of composites.

Chou, who joined the University of Delaware faculty in 1969, has conducted pioneering research in a number of composites-related topics. He has been recognized by ISI as a Highly Cited Researcher and was the recipient of UD's Francis Alison Award in 2001.

Thostenson, who joined the University faculty in 2005 after earning his doctorate in materials science, recently received a prestigious grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Research Program.

He received UD's Alan Colburn Prize for Outstanding Dissertation in the Engineering and Mathematical Sciences in 2004 and has received other major awards from the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineers (SAMPE), the Japan Society for Composite Materials, and the American Society for Composites.

Thostenson's recent work has focused on the use of carbon nanotubes to sense damage in composite materials, which received world-wide attention after the initial paper he and Chou co-authored on this subject was published in Advanced Materials in 2006.

Article by Diane Kukich