Another Top 10

UC Santa Barbara has once again placed among the top 10 in Leiden University’s annual rankings of the 750 best major universities in the world, in terms of impact in the field of the sciences. UCSB took the No. 7 spot overall.

Compiled by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, the ranking is based on data from the Web of Science bibliographic database produced by Thomson Reuters. It includes the Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index.

The Leiden Ranking is a compilation of the top 750 universities worldwide with the largest publication output in the Web of Science database. Impact is determined by several indicators, including the average number of citations of the publications of a university, and the proportion of publications that belong in the top 10 percent most frequently cited. Based on 2010 to 2013 numbers in the Web of Science database, UCSB’s scientific publications — which include papers in the areas of life, biomedical, mathematics, engineering, computer, natural and social sciences and humanities — are cited an average of 11.66 times, and 20.3 percent of its scientific publications belong in the top 10 percent of most frequently cited publications.

Compared with the 2014 edition of the Leiden Ranking, the current edition offers the possibility to perform trend analyses. Bibliometric statistics are available not only for the period 2010-2013 but also for earlier periods. In addition, the 2015 edition provides new impact indicators based on counting publications that that belong in the top 1 percent or top 50 percent of their field.

According to the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, the Leiden Ranking “offers more advanced indicators of scientific impact and collaboration and uses a more transparent methodology.” The ranking does not use data from reputational surveys, or data provided by the universities themselves, and employs bibliometric methods —quantitative analyses of patterns of publication — to analyze the impact of and collaboration by the top 750 universities in the field of the sciences. The Centre is a leading provider of science and technology indicators, and of performance and benchmark studies of scientific groups and institutes.