As the table at right shows, Harvard University posted the highest number of Top Ten appearances, showing up in 15 of the 21 rankings. Stanford University was second, with 11 appearances. This repeats the results seen in the last set of rankings in 1998, when Harvard and Stanford also finished one-two in overall placements. The remaining schools in the table (that is, those with at least six Top Ten appearances) are also holdovers from the 1998 survey, with the exception of Columbia University and Duke University, both of which debut here among the top finishers. (Ties in the table were broken by summing the various ranks attained by each university; those with a lower sum earned a higher place.)

This time, three schools that appeared among the elite in the 1998 survey narrowly missed the six-or-more-fields threshold for inclusion in the new table: Cornell University and the University of Washington each scored five Top Ten placements, while the University of California, Santa Barbara, made the grade in four fields. Click the links to view the last survey, from the September/October and November/December 1998 issues.

As in the previous surveys, Science Watch drew upon the exclusive publication and citation data in ISI’s University Science Indicators 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 1997 and 2001. 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 clinical medicine, for example, papers from Harvard University were cited, on average, 9.78 times during 1997-2001. The world average for the field was 4.54. Harvard, therefore, scored 115% above the world average to win its first-place ranking in the field, followed by the University of California, San Diego, which scored 106% above the world mark. (Tie scores in relative impact were settled in two ways: preference was given to universities that displayed a higher impact score before the "relative" figure was calculated and rounded off—e.g., in neurosciences, the University of Illinois’s average of 12.50 cites per paper edged the Johns Hopkins University score of 12.46 citations. When the impact score itself happened to be identical, as in plant & animal sciences, where UCLA and UC Berkeley shared the mark of 5.69 cites per paper, priority went to the school that produced the greater number of papers.)

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 each field, and in the number of papers published in those journals.

A slightly different overall ranking for these 10 universities can be obtained by calculating their average showings (that is, by taking the sum of their ranks and dividing by the number of the number of appearances.) By this measure, Caltech scored the highest average placement, with a mark of 3.14, followed by Harvard at 3.40, then Duke and Yale (4.50 each), MIT (4.67), Stanford (5.36), UC Berkeley (5.63), UC San Diego (5.78), Columbia (6.38), and the University of Michigan (6.71).

  Continued on the following page.