Pitt Is No. 24 Among All Universities Worldwide in New Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities

The University of Pittsburgh is No. 24 among all universities worldwide, No. 18 among all U.S. universities, No. 9 among U.S. public universities, and No. 1 among public universities in Pennsylvania in the overall Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities 2012 recently released by National Taiwan University (NTU).

The other universities in the top 24 are Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Washington, UCLA, Michigan, Toronto, Berkeley, Oxford, MIT, Penn, UC-San Francisco, Columbia, UC-San Diego, Cambridge, University College London, Tokyo, Duke, Yale, Imperial College London, Cornell, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Pitt placed higher in the ranking than North Carolina, Washington University in St. Louis, Northwestern, Chicago, CalTech, and NYU among the 476 others that were ranked.

According to NTU, the system employed in the ranking evaluates “the scientific paper performance of the top 500 universities worldwide. Three criteria, represented by eight indicators, were used to assess universities’ overall scientific paper performance: research productivity (accounting for 25 percent of the score), research impact (35 percent), and research excellence (40 percent).”

The quantitative data used in the ranking were drawn from the Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index. “Today,” according to the NTU ranking background statement, “the performance of released publications in international academic journals is the predominant mode of scientific research output. Statistics on the articles published in international academic journals provide an objective representation of each university’s research performance.”

The ranking is posted online at http://nturanking.lis.ntu.edu.tw.