Associate Prof. Joël Billieux was ranked 4th among the most influential academics in psychology worldwide, according to a performance metric in the 2018 global ranking produced by Elsevier.
The Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) classifies the citations of researchers’ publications in comparison with the average number of citations of all similar publications in the global Scopus database. Similar publications are those for example scientific articles or book chapters in the Scopus database that are comparable in terms of publication year, type, and discipline. The metric refers to the citations received in the year of publication plus the following 3 years. According to the FWCI, Joël Billieux is ranked 4th in the whole psychology field in 2018, in a pool that includes researchers from 4,600 institutions.
Prof Billieux’s FWCI index of 4.34 shows that his publications are being cited over four times more than the average for similar publications on a global level, making him one of the most influent researcher in today’s research in psychology.
“This ranking is an outstanding recognition for the quality of the work we conducted in the last years, as well as the growing importance and visibility of addictive and compulsive behaviors in the psychology field. It is ought to mention that this ranking reflects the performance of a team, and this would not have been possible without the commitment and passion of the PhD students and post-doc I had the pleasure to supervise in the last years.”
The psychology of addictive and compulsive behaviors
Joël Billieux is Ass. Prof in Clinical psychology and the Director of the Addictive and Compulsive Behaviors Lab (ACB-Lab) at the University of Luxembourg. The research team investigates the psychological processes (cognitive, affective, motivational, interpersonal) involved in addictive and compulsive disorders, and specialises in the development of psychological interventions targeting the incriminated processes (such as self-control, mental imagery, cognitive and attentional bias). An additional focus of ACB-Lab is the identification of psychological processes shared by the various addictive and compulsive disorders.
Other research conducted by Prof. Billieux concerns the conceptualisation and diagnosis of behavioral addictions (such as gaming and gambling disorder or excessive sexual behaviors) and the effect of emerging technologies on human behavior.
Prof. Billieux received in 2017 the Young Researcher in Human and Social Sciences 2016-2017 award from the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie. He joined the University of Luxembourg in 2017 and acts as expert in the field of Gaming and Gambling disorders at the World Health Organization (WHO). In this capacity, he participates in working groups on the public health impact of new information technologies and the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), which was released in 2018 (for the first time in 2018, gaming disorder has been added to the section on addictive disorders).