Friday, October 04, 2013

MIT and TMU are the most influential research universities in the world

I hope to comment extensively on the new Times Higher Education - Thomson Reuters rankings in a while but for the moment here is a comment on the citations indicator.

Last year Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuters solemnly informed the world that the two most influential places for research were Rice University in Texas and the Moscow State Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI).

Now, the top two for Citations: research influence are MIT, which sounds a bit more sensible than Rice, and Tokyo Metropolitan University. Rice has slipped very slightly and MEPhI has disappeared from the general rankings because it was realised that it is a single-subject institution. I wonder how they worked that out.

That may be a bit unfair. What about that paper on opposition politics in central Russia in the 1920s?

Tokyo Metropolitan University's success at first seems rather odd because it also has a very low score for Research, which probably means that it has a poor reputation for research, does not receive much funding, has few graduate students and/or publishes few papers. So how could its research be so influential?

The answer is that it was one of scores of contributors to a couple of multi-authored publications on particle physics and a handful of widely cited papers in genetics and also produced few papers overall. I will let Thomson Reuters explain how that makes it into a pocket or a mountain of excellence.

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