NC State Statistician Dickey Named Clarivate Citation Laureate

David Dickey, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistics at NC State, has been named a 2020 Citation Laureate by Clarivate Web of Science. The award honors researchers whose work and influence “is comparable to that of past and future Nobel Prize recipients.”

Dickey, who helped create the widely used Dickey-Fuller Test in 1979, is an award-winning statistician and a founding member of NC State’s Institute for Advanced Analytics. Dickey was recognized by Clarivate in the Economics category for his work in time-series analyses, specifically statistical tests of a unit root in a time-series analysis, that have made profound impacts in the field of economics. Since Clarivate began naming Citation Laureates in 2002, 54 have gone on to receive a Nobel Prize.

“I’m very appreciative of this award,” Dickey said in an interview with Clarivate. “I like the fact that it’s for citations because I think citations mean that someone was using your work, that maybe you’ve helped somebody or done something useful.”

The Citation Laureate award was created by Clarivate Web of Science, an organization that provides data, analytics, insights, and other information to the scientific community and public. The award is presented to scientists and economists whose research has been cited by an exceptionally high number of peers. Out of 50 million research papers indexed in Web of Science since 1970, only 5,700 of those had more than 2,000 citations. Dickey has had two such papers, and nearly 16,000 total paper citations.

Dickey earned a Ph.D. in statistics from Iowa State University in 1976 and an M.S. in mathematics from Miami University in Ohio in 1969.

This post was originally published in College of Sciences News.