U.S. University Top Tens - Harvard, Stanford Still Tops

U.S. University "Top Tens": Harvard, Stanford Still Tops

by Christopher King

his marks the fourth installment in a series, now having appeared every four years since 1994, in which Science Watch presents "Top Ten" rankings of the top 100 federally funded U.S. universities, based on the citation impact of their published research in major fields of science and the social sciences. The latest two-part collection of listings shows the universities whose research papers attracted citations at a rate notably above the world average in each of 21 fields over the last five years. Nine rankings in the biological sciences appear in the tables below. Additional rankings covering the physical and social sciences will appear in the next issue.

Highest Impact U.S. Universities, 2001-2005
(Ranked by frequency of Top Ten appearances in 21 fields)

Rank	Institution	Top Ten Appearances
1	Harvard University	15
2	Stanford University	13
3	Univ. Calif., Berkeley	10
4	University of Washington	8
5	MIT	7
6	Yale University	6
7	Univ. Calif., San Diego	6
8	Princeton University	5
9	University of Pennsylvania	5
10	Caltech	5
11	Univ. Calif., San Francisco	5
12	Columbia University	5

SOURCE;
Thomson Scientific’s University Science Indicators.

As the table at right shows, Harvard University makes the highest number of Top Ten placements, appearing in 15 of the 21 rankings, matching its performance in the 2002 installment. And as was the case four years ago, Stanford University is second, finishing here with 13 Top Ten appearances. Those two schools have vied for top honors throughout this series, with Stanford grabbing the lead spot in 1994 but Harvard taking it over ever since. Among the universities listed here, four others also deserve special mention: MIT, Yale, Caltech, and the University of California (UC), Berkeley. All have now appeared among the page-one honorees in all four of these Top Ten roundups since 1994. Nearly as impressively, the University of Washington and UC San Diego have each appeared among the top finishers in three of the four surveys. (The previous two surveys, incidentally, can be viewed at sciencewatch.com, in the September/October and November/December issues for 1998 and 2002.) Also noteworthy in the table are the University of Pennsylvania and UC San Francisco, both making their first appearances—even if their tallies of Stanford University five placements are below the threshold of six or more employed in the previous roundups.

This survey, like its predecessors, derives from the exclusive publication and citation data in Thomson Scientific’s University Science Indicators database. In 21 fields, each defined by a discrete set of Thomson-indexed journals, Science Watch calculated the citations-per-paper (impact) score for each university, based on papers published and cited between 2001 and 2005. The resulting figure was compared to a world baseline figure representing the impact for the field during the same period. This produced a "relative impact" score, expressed as a percentage. In the field of neurosciences & behavior, for example, papers from MIT were cited, on average, 16.31 times during 2001-05. The world average for the field was 7.88. MIT, therefore, scored 107% above the world average in its first-place ranking in the field, followed by Rockefeller University, which scored 105% above the world mark. (Tie scores in relative impact were handled in two ways: preference was given to universities that displayed a higher impact score before the "relative" figure was calculated and rounded off—as in clinical medicine, for example, where the Oregon Health & Science University cites-per-paper score of 9.96 slightly edged the 9.94 cites posted by Johns Hopkins. When the impact score itself happened to be identical, priority went to the university that produced a greater number of papers.)

A slightly different ranking for these 12 universities can be obtained by calculating their average placements (that is, by taking the sum of their ranks and then dividing by the number of appearances). By this measure, Yale scored the highest average placement with a score of 2.67, followed MIT at 3.00, then Harvard (3.80), Princeton (4.40), Stanford and Penn (5.00), UC San Diego (5.33), Caltech (5.60), U. Washington (5.63), UC Berkeley (6.10), UC San Francisco (6.60), and Columbia (7.20).

Top Ten Universities in
Biological Science Fields, 2001-2005

Clinical Medicine ³1,200 papers	Neurosciences ³300 papers	Agricultural Sciences ³300 papers
Plant & Animal Science ³300 papers	Immunology ³300 papers	Ecology/Environment ³300 papers
Molecular Biology & Genetics ³500 papers	Pharmacology ³200 papers	Biology & Biochemistry ³500 papers

SOURCE: Thomson Scientific’s University Science Indicators.
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Rank

Institution

# of
Papers

Relative
Impact (%)

1	Harvard University	18,800	+103
2	Vanderbilt University	4,065	+102
3	U. Massachusetts, Worcester	1,612	+94
4	Stanford University	6,298	+93
5	Univ. Calif., San Diego	5,044	+93
6	Univ. Texas, San Antonio	2,576	+90
7	Tufts University	3,002	+88
8	Oregon Health & Sci. Univ.	3,111	+84
9	Johns Hopkins University	12,066	+84
10	Emory University	4,857	+84

Clinical
Medicine

³1,200 Papers

Rank

Institution

# of
Papers

Relative
Impact (%)

1	MIT	319	+107
2	Rockefeller University	444	+105
3	Stanford University	1,410	+77
4	Washington University	1,297	+74
5	Baylor Coll. of Medicine	733	+71
6	Univ. Calif., San Francisco	1,547	+69
7	Univ. Texas Southwestern Med. Ctr., Dallas	672	+69
8	Harvard University	3,486	+64
9	Emory University	1,115	+57
10	Univ. Calif., Berkeley	469	+57

Neurosciences

³300 Papers

Rank

Institution

# of
Papers

Relative
Impact (%)

1	Oregon State University	420	+65
2	Univ. Wisconsin, Madison	765	+56
3	Cornell University	824	+56
4	Rutgers University	381	+53
5	Univ. Calif., Davis	1,104	+52
6	University of Minnesota	648	+46
7	Pennsylvania State University	609	+38
8	Washington State University	539	+26
9	University of Nebraska	592	+24
10	Univ. Illinois, Urbana	674	+19

Agricultural
Sciences

³300 Papers

Rank

Institution

# of
Papers

Relative
Impact (%)

1	Univ. Calif., Berkeley	987	+129
2	University of Arizona	721	+123
3	Duke University	560	+115
4	Yale University	377	+115
5	Univ. Calif., Santa Barbara	357	+114
6	Univ. Calif., San Diego	612	+113
7	Woods Hole Ocean. Inst.	588	+90
8	Harvard University	674	+80
9	Indiana University	345	+66
10	University of Missouri	1,134	+59

Plant &
Animal
Science

³300 Papers

Rank

Institution

# of
Papers

Relative
Impact (%)

1	Stanford University	604	+90
2	Yale University	552	+83
3	University of Chicago	312	+60
4	Washington University	595	+56
5	Harvard University	2,131	+51
6	Univ. Calif., San Francisco	923	+47
7	University of Iowa	340	+46
8	New York University	360	+44
9	Univ. Calif., San Diego	430	+37
10	University of Washington	852	+36

Immunology

³300 Papers

Rank

Institution

# of
Papers

Relative
Impact (%)

1	Univ. Calif., Santa Barbara	399	+113
2	Stanford University	457	+95
3	Univ. Wisconsin, Madison	712	+85
4	Harvard University	536	+80
5	University of Washington	682	+76
6	Arizona State University	355	+72
7	U. North Carolina, Chapel Hill	322	+67
8	Michigan State University	557	+65
9	Univ. Calif., Berkeley	996	+59
10	Duke University	554	+57

Ecology/
Environment

³300 Papers

Rank

Institution

# of
Papers

Relative
Impact (%)

1	MIT	665	+184
2	Rockefeller University	517	+100
3	Harvard University	3,277	+80
4	Univ. Calif., San Diego	1,061	+76
5	Yale University	1,034	+75
6	Univ. Calif., San Francisco	1,238	+73
7	Columbia University	962	+64
8	Univ. Texas Southwestern Med. Ctr., Dallas	660	+64
9	Stanford University	1,178	+62
10	Univ. Calif., Berkeley	886	+60

Molecular
Biology &
Genetics

³500 Papers

Rank

Institution

# of
Papers

Relative
Impact (%)

1	Vanderbilt University	356	+124
2	Univ. Calif., San Diego	225	+118
3	University of Pennsylvania	244	+84
4	Columbia University	200	+80
5	Univ. Calif., San Francisco	377	+80
6	U. North Carolina, Chapel Hill	629	+70
7	University of Washington	469	+69
8	University of Colorado	281	+61
9	Indiana University	223	+61
10	Johns Hopkins University	377	+59

Pharmacology

³200 Papers

Rank

Institution

# of
Papers

Relative
Impact (%)

1	Univ. Texas Southwestern Med. Ctr., Dallas	1,311	+92
2	Harvard University	4,562	+78
3	Univ. Southern California	842	+73
4	University of Virginia	1,068	+72
5	Yeshiva University	897	+71
6	Washington University	1,671	+68
7	Oregon Health & Sci. Univ.	727	+63
8	Stanford University	1,645	+63
9	Duke University	1,508	+59
10	Univ. Calif., San Francisco	1,846	+58

Biology &
Biochemistry

³500 Papers

Top

Science Watch^®, November/December 2006, Vol. 17, No. 6
Citing URL: http://www.sciencewatch.com/nov-dec2006/sw_nov-dec2006_page1.htm