By the Numbers: The Most-Cited Scholars at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education

Most rankings of Stanford’s most-cited scholars are dominated by medicine, genomics and machine learning. That is a fact about how those fields publish, not a verdict on anyone else. So this installment of our faculty series narrows the lens to a single school, the Graduate School of Education, and asks a simpler question: within education research, whose work has drawn the most attention, and what is it about?

How we counted

The figures below come from OpenAlex, the free, open index of scholarly works, retrieved live on Oct. 31, 2026. For each person we report three numbers: works (items OpenAlex attributes to that author), citations (how many times those works have been cited by other indexed works) and h-index (the largest number h such that the author has h works cited at least h times each). Current titles and emeritus status were checked against each person’s Stanford Profiles page.

A necessary caveat before the table. Publication and citation counts strongly favor fields with large teams and many short papers, such as biomedicine, high-energy physics, genomics and machine learning. Education, like law and parts of business, publishes in venues that bibliometric databases cover unevenly, and much influential work in the field appears as books, reports and policy briefs that are undercounted. Author matching is also imperfect: a database can merge two people with similar names or split one person into several records. These numbers measure output and attention within one index. They do not measure quality, teaching or influence on classrooms, and they should be compared only within the field.

The table

The 15 GSE scholars with the highest citation counts in our starting list, emeriti included and marked:

Name	Status	Works	Citations	h-index
Richard J. Shavelson	Emeritus	425	31,961	68
Jonathan Osborne	Emeritus	285	30,504	71
Geoffrey L. Cohen	Faculty	228	24,011	60
Hilda Borko	Faculty	212	21,777	50
Roy D. Pea	Faculty	391	21,774	64
Susanna Loeb	Faculty	592	21,428	66
Bruce D. McCandliss	Faculty	175	20,312	55
Larry Cuban	Emeritus	286	17,731	46
Philip A. Fisher	Faculty	321	14,411	63
Francisco O. Ramírez	Emeritus	149	13,610	42
Thomas S. Dee	Faculty	269	12,298	53
Martín Carnoy	Faculty	549	10,703	48
Jelena Obradović	Faculty	167	9,925	48
Benjamin W. Domingue	Faculty	333	9,024	46
Eric Bettinger	Faculty	388	8,907	42

Two things stand out. First, the top of the list is close: five people sit between about 20,000 and 24,000 citations. Second, the three columns tell different stories. Susanna Loeb has the most works, 592, while Jonathan Osborne, an emeritus professor, has the highest h-index, 71, on fewer than half as many. Martín Carnoy has more than 540 works but fewer citations than several colleagues with a third as many. Volume and attention are not the same thing.

Four portraits

Geoffrey L. Cohen leads current faculty by citations, with 24,011 across 228 works and an h-index of 60 (OpenAlex A5112820443). He holds a joint appointment across education and business; Stanford Profiles lists him as James G. March Professor of Organizational Studies in Education and Business. His three most-cited papers are a 2007 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, “A question of belonging: Race, social fit, and achievement” (2,163 citations); a 2011 paper in Science, “A Brief Social-Belonging Intervention Improves Academic and Health Outcomes of Minority Students” (1,992); and a 2006 chapter, “The Psychology of Self-defense: Self-Affirmation Theory” (1,614). The common thread is the psychology of belonging and threat in school, and the idea that short, carefully designed interventions can change how students interpret adversity.

Hilda Borko, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor and associate dean for faculty affairs, has 21,777 citations from 212 works (OpenAlex A5013834472), roughly 100 citations per work. Her most-cited paper, “Professional Development and Teacher Learning: Mapping the Terrain,” published in Educational Researcher in 2004, has 4,208 citations, the single most-cited paper among the four portraits here. A 2000 paper with a similar focus, “What Do New Views of Knowledge and Thinking Have to Say About Research on Teacher Learning?,” adds 3,339. Her subject, in short, is how teachers themselves learn.

Susanna Loeb, the Kissick Family Professor and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, is the school’s most prolific author in OpenAlex, with 592 works, 21,428 citations and an h-index of 66 (OpenAlex A5073914508). OpenAlex lists both Brown University and Stanford among her recent institutions. Her most-cited papers are about the teacher workforce: “Teacher Sorting and the Plight of Urban Schools” (2002, 1,454 citations), “How Teacher Turnover Harms Student Achievement” (2012, 1,324) and “Teacher Preparation and Student Achievement” (2009, 796). The titles alone sketch a research program on who teaches where, and what happens when they leave.

Bruce D. McCandliss, the Pigott Family Graduate School of Education Professor, reaches 20,312 citations on just 175 works, the highest ratio of citations to works among current faculty in the table, with an h-index of 55 (OpenAlex A5001815664). His record shows how a field’s citation habits travel with the work: his best-known papers are in cognitive neuroscience, a heavily citing discipline. “Testing the Efficiency and Independence of Attentional Networks” (2002) has 3,717 citations; “The visual word form area: expertise for reading in the fusiform gyrus” (2003) has 1,489. It is a reminder of the caveat above: even inside one school, a scholar who publishes in neuroscience journals is playing by different citation rules than one who writes for education policy outlets.

Honorable mention

Roy D. Pea sits just behind Borko, with 21,774 citations and an h-index of 64 (OpenAlex A5036567109). His most-cited paper, “Computational Thinking in K–12” (2013), has 2,547 citations, and it is a frequently cited reference on bringing computational thinking into schools.

What the numbers miss

A list like this cannot capture several kinds of influence that matter a great deal in education: books that shape teacher preparation, state and federal policy work, curricula, and the graduate students who go on to lead school systems. Emeriti such as Richard Shavelson, Jonathan Osborne, Larry Cuban and Francisco Ramírez remain near the top because citations accumulate over a career. And the field-bias caveat applies within the school, too, as McCandliss’s record shows.

Read for what it is, the table is a map of where the scholarly conversation in education has gathered: teacher learning and the teacher workforce, belonging and motivation, the neuroscience of attention and reading, and computing in schools. That is a fair portrait of a school whose research reaches from the classroom to the lab.

Photo: Mx. Granger / Wikimedia Commons, CC0. The School of Education building at Stanford, June 2019.