Now Science Watch returns with a series of updated rankings covering the last five years. This new survey shows the universities whose research papers attracted citations at a rate notably above the world average in each field between 1993 and 1997. Nine rankings in the biological sciences appear on page 2 of this issue; additional rankings in the physical sciences and a few social-science fields will appear in the next issue.

    As before, Science Watch used the exclusive publication and citation data in ISI’s University Science Indicators on Diskette database. In 21 fields (each defined by a discrete set of ISI-indexed journals), Science Watch calculated the citations-per-paper (impact) score for each university, based on papers published and cited between 1993 and 1997. This 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 clinical medicine, for example, papers from Johns Hopkins University were cited, on average, 9.29 times during 1993-97. The world average for the field was 4.01. Johns Hopkins, therefore, scored 129% above the world average for its first-place ranking, followed closely by Harvard, which scored 126% above the world mark.

    Harvard, in fact, having finished second in the overall standings in the 1981-93 survey, turned the tables on Stanford this time, appearing in 17 of the 21 rankings. Yale, MIT, and Caltech made the overall top six, as they did in the previous survey. The most highly placed newcomer was the University of Michigan, with its nine Top Ten appearances. Two University of California institutions, UC Santa Barbara and UC San Diego, also debuted among the overall honorees. (Ties in the above table were broken by summing the various ranks attained by each university; those with a lower sum earned a higher place.)

    In each field, in order to confine the analysis to universities that produced a substantial body of papers during the five-year period, Science Watch set a minimum threshold for number of papers produced. This threshold varied, reflecting differences from field to field in the number of journals used to define the field and the number of papers published in those journals.

    A slightly different overall ranking of these 11 standout universities can be obtained by calculating their average showings (that is, by taking the sum of their ranks and dividing by the number of appearances). By this measure, Harvard is first with a score of 3.19, followed by Caltech with 4.00, with the field rounded out by MIT (4.13), the University of Washington (4.50), Stanford (4.83), Yale and UC Santa Barbara (5.33 each), Cornell (6.33), UC San Diego (6.50), UC Berkeley (7.43), and the University of Michigan (7.50). continued 

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