Productive Universities

QS has been analysing university research output using Scopus data. The world's most productive university measured by the number of papers is Toronto. The top ten contain Harvard and five more US institutions, University College London, Sao Paulo and Tokyo.

Harvard is first for total citations and Rockefeller, a specialist medical school, for citations per paper.

It seems that the presence or absence of a medical school makes a lot of difference to performance measures based on total publications or citations. In general, there are substantial differences between disciplines with medicine and the humanities at opposite ends of the spectrum. The performance of schools like Toronto may to some extent reflect their balance of discipline.

Times Higher and Thomson Reuters would say that the answer to this problem lies in normalisation. But that raises another questions, namely whether all disciplines can be considered equal.