Leiden Ranking is published by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University. It does not produce overall scores or ranks although public interest tends to focus on specific metrics such as total publications or the percent of publications in the most frequently cited 10% of journals.
The website provides a number of settings such as field, region or country, minimum threshold of publications, and fractional counting, which users can check. For some metrics confidence intervals are supplied.
This year’s ranking provides further evidence of the steady advance of Chinese universities. Harvard continues to lead for the number of publications (using default settings) but the gap between Harvard and second place Shanghai Jiao Tong University has narrowed by about five percentage points. Altogether, there are now 12 Chinese universities in the top twenty for this metric.
The USA does, however, continue to lead at the highest levels of research quality. Rockefeller University, New York, holds the lead for the percentage of pares in the top 1% of journals, followed by MIT, Stanford and Harvard. Shandong University of Science and technology is in sixth place.
There are also metrics for collaboration, open access and gender equity in publishing. The top university for international collaboration (percentage of papers) is the University of Science and Technology, South Korea, for industrial collaboration the China University of Petroleum, for percentage of papers in open access publications Bilkent University, Turkey, and for percentage of papers with female authors the Medical University of Bialystock, Poland.
One of Leiden Ranking’s objectives is to promote socially responsible metrics and it has taken note of the concerns expressed by the International Network of Research Management Systems in a recent publication in Scholarly Assessment Reports. It has, for example, provided new information about funding and competing interests.
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