Highlights from the Research Impact (Citations) Indicator
One very good thing to emerge from the current round of rankings is the iphone/ipad apps from THE and QS. The THE app is especially helpful since it contains the scores for the various indicators for each of 400 universities. It is possible then to construct a ranking for research imact as measured by citations, which gets nearly one third of the weighting.
Some highlights
1st Caltech
4th Alexandria University
9th Harvard
10th UC Santa Barbara
13th Hong Kong Baptist University
20th Bilkent
23rd Oxford
27th Royal Holloway
31st Johns Hopkins
41st University of Adelaide
45TH Imperial College
65th Australian National University
84th Kent State
11oth Mcgill
143th Tokyo Metropolitan University
164th Tokyo University
285th Warwick
302nd Delft University of Technology
368th South Australia
1 comment:
As you can see from the following paragraph(http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2010-2011/analysis-methodology.html) Thomson has normalised citations against each of their 251 subject categories (it's extremely difficult to get this data directly from WOS).. They have great experience in this kind of analysis.. to get an idea, check their in-cites website http://sciencewatch.com/about/met/thresholds/#tab3 where they have citations thresholds for the last 10 years against broad fields.
Paragraph mentioned above:
"Citation impact: it's all relative
Citations are widely recognised as a strong indicator of the significance and relevance — that is, the impact — of a piece of research.
However, citation data must be used with care as citation rates can vary between subjects and time periods.
For example, papers in the life sciences tend to be cited more frequently than those published in the social sciences.
The rankings this year use normalised citation impact, where the citations to each paper are compared with the average number of citations received by all papers published in the same field and year. So a paper with a relative citation impact of 2.0 is cited twice as frequently as the average for similar papers.
The data were extracted from the Thomson Reuters resource known as Web of Science, the largest and most comprehensive database of research citations available.
Its authoritative and multidisciplinary content covers more than 11,600 of the highest-impact journals worldwide. The benchmarking exercise is carried out on an exact level across 251 subject areas for each year in the period 2004 to 2008.
For institutions that produce few papers, the relative citation impact may be significantly influenced by one or two highly cited papers and therefore it does not accurately reflect their typical performance. However, institutions publishing fewer than 50 papers a year have been excluded from the rankings.
There are occasions where a groundbreaking academic paper is so influential as to drive the citation counts to extreme levels — receiving thousands of citations. An institution that contributes to one of these papers will receive a significant and noticeable boost to its citation impact, and this reflects such institutions' contribution to globally significant research projects."
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