The Wuhan Rankings

I have just noticed, via Wikipedia, a world university ranking by the Research Centre for China Science Evaluation at Wuhan University that seems to be based on current research productivity. Since the website does not have an English version, it is not possible to comment very much about it at the moment. According to Wikipedia it " is based on Essential Science Indicators (ESI), which provides data of journal article publication counts and citation frequencies in over 11,000 journals around the world in 22 research fields". If anyone can look at the website and tell me what the research fields are and what period is covered I'd be grateful.

I noticed some errors in the rankings. Laval University is located in France not Canada, York in the US, not Canada, and Bern in Sweden. Ljubljana is listed as being in "Jugoslavia", a few years out of date.

If the rankers have assessed a broad range of subjects and if they have looked at a recent period and if their methods are valid they may have produced a ranking of research achievement that is more current than the Shanghai index which includes decades-old Nobel and Fields prize winners. The ranking gives low positions to Cambridge and Oxford confirming suspicions that their high rating by THES -QS is unjustified. Princeton and Yale (strengths in the humanities?) have relatively low places. So do Chicago (strength in the social sciences?) and Caltech.

There are some more surprises. Texas is at number 2. Maybe this represents a genuine advance or perhaps the presence of a large medical school has something to do with it. "Univ Washington" is at number 3. This most probably means Washington University in St Louis. Before getting too excited about this result I would like to be sure that there has been no confusion with The University of Washington, Washington State University and George Washington University.



Here are is the top 20 along with the scores. Harvard at the top gets 100. The full ranking can be found here.



1. Harvard 100

2. Texas 87.49

3. "Univ Washington" 72.39

4. Stanford 71.91

5. Johns Hopkins 71.45

6. UC Berkeley 70.76

7. UCLA 70.38

8. Michigan 69.11

9. MIT 68.62

10. Toronto 66,90

11. Wisconsin 64.83

12. Columbia 64.71

13. UC San Diego 64.54

14. Pennsylvania 64.42

15. Cambridge 62.93

16. Minnesota 62.80

17. Yale 62.20

18. Cornell 62.19

19 UC San Francisco 61.52

20. Duke 60.60