Canada’s Top 50 Research Universities List ranks full-service universities based on their total sponsored research income. In order to obtain a more balanced picture of how universities are performing, the rankings take into account key measures of research success. The measures included are: total sponsored research income, research intensity per faculty, research intensity per graduate student, total number of publications, publication intensity and publication impact.

For each measure, the top ranking institution in each tier (category) was assigned a score of 100 point and the other institutions’ score was calculated as a percent of the first ranking institution. The total score for each university was out of a possible 100 points.

Listed below is an explanation of each indicator:

Total Sponsored Research Income (20%) – based on the university’s Fiscal 2020 Top 50 sponsored research income amount.

Research Intensity per Faculty (20%) – defined as total research income per faculty (full, associate and assistant faculty positions only were included).

Research Intensity per Graduate Student (10%) – defined as total research income per graduate student (graduate students include full and part-time students enrolled in graduate level master’s and doctorate programs and courses leading to degrees, certificates or diplomas).

Total Number of Publications (20%) – publications include articles, notes and reviews published by researchers affiliated with Canadian universities or research hospitals in 13,415 peer-reviewed scientific international journals, covering different fields of natural science, health science and social science and humanities. Points are based on the total number of publications published by researchers affiliated with a particular university.

Publication Intensity (20%) – defined as the total number of publications per faculty (full, associate and assistant faculty positions only were included).

Publication Impact (10%) – points are based on the Average Relative Impact Factor (ARIF), which was developed and provided by OST. It is based on a measure of the perceived impact of research through a calculation of citations received by journals. The impact factor does not measure the specific number of citations per article (direct impact), but rather, a measure of the probability of being cited (perceived impact). OST developed the ARIF to compare the impact factor from several specialties because an article’s probability of being cited is not the same for all fields. The ARIF does not include journals on the Humanities field. To ensure that the ARIF score was meaningful, any university with less than 125 publications was not allocated points.