Second Edition

The National Research Council in the US has released a new version  of its 2010 doctoral program rankings. It seems that there were a large number of errors first time around  According to an article by David Glenn in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The National Research Council released on Thursday a revised edition of its 2010 rankings of American doctoral programs that corrects four types of errors discovered in the original report, which was issued last September. But the new rankings do not deal with certain other concerns that scholars have raised about the project.

In the revised edition, almost all programs' positions on the council's "ranges of rankings" have changed at least slightly, but in most cases the changes are not substantial. In a few academic fields, however, the numbers have changed significantly for at least 20 percent of the programs. Those include geography, linguistics, and operations research.

A spreadsheet of the new rankings is available for download at the council's Web site. The council has also released a separate, much smaller spreadsheet that summarizes the changes in programs' "R" and "S" rankings. (R rankings reflect how similar a program is to the programs in its field with the strongest reputations. S rankings more directly reflect a program's performance on variables that scholars in the field say are most important, such as faculty research productivity or student diversity.)

The new edition makes four kinds of corrections. The original report in many cases undercounted faculty members' honors and awards, the proportion of new graduates who find academic jobs, and the proportion of first-year students who are given full financial support. In nonhumanities fields, the report also used faulty data for faculty members' 2002 publications, which in turn caused errors in calculations of citation counts.