The Shanghai Rankings: Social Science

Shanghai Jiao Tong University has also released, earlier this year, research rankings in broad subject areas. First here are the top twenty for the social sciences. The full ranking is here. These rankings should be taken with a fair bit of salt since they are heavily biased towards economics and business studies. Credit is given for Nobel prizes although these are only awarded for economics while psychology and psychiatry are excluded. There are two categories of highly cited researchers, Social Sciences -- general and Economics/Business.

It would, I think, be better to refer to this as an economics and business ranking.


1. Harvard
2. Chicago
3. Stanford
4. Columbia
5. Berkeley
6. MIT
7. Princeton
8. Pennsylvania
9. Yale
10.Michigan -- Ann Arbor
11. New York Univ
12. Minnesota -- Twin Cities
13. Carnegie-Mellon
14. UCLA
15. Northwestern
16. Cambridge
17. Duke
18. Maryland -- College Park
19. Texas -- Austin
19 . Wisconsin-- Madison


Note that there is only one non-US university in the top twenty, Cambridge at number 16. The best Asian university is the Hebrew University in Jerusalem at 40. The best Australian university is ANU at 77-104 . There is no mainland Chinese university in the top 100. This is dramatically different from the picture shown by the THES peer review in 2006.