Ranking programs based on the number of scholarly publications

College Search & Selection
1

<p>This might be a useful piece of information if you are trying to evaluate the scholarly productivity of an academic department. I use an online publication database called Science Direct available through most university libraries. There are other online publication databases for different subject areas. The important thing is that some online databases allow you to search by "author affiliation". This is the school the author is from.</p>

<p>I tried "physics and astronomy" for example.</p>

<p>Washington University in St Louis was a difficult search. I wound up just using "Washington University" in quotes. But, usually it works best if you type in the entire name in quotes.</p>

<p>The publics were also tricky. The search engine had an "AND' function. To illustrate, I would search for "Los Angeles" "AND" "University of California". I think that worked pretty well for the state schools.</p>

<p>The numbers below are just raw numbers. Raw numbers are meaningful, but if you want publications per faculty member, look up the number of faculty on the school's website and divide.</p>

<p>school, number of scholarly citations in physics/astronomy since 1999</p>

<p>Berkeley 7376
MIT 5762
Caltech 5549
Stanford 5292
Michigan 4437
Illinois 4148
Wisconsin 3907
Cornell 3735
U Maryland College Park 3628
Princeton 3502
Harvard 3331
UCLA 3318
Penn 3119
UC San Diego 2815
Columbia 2699
Chicago 2692
Northwestern 2540
Yale 2463
Notre Dame 2272
U Rochester 2164
Washington U 2152
Johns Hopkins 2010
Duke 1989
Carnegie Mellon 1868
Brown 1746
Virginia 1688
USC 1617
Vanderbilt 1365
Georgia Tech 1321
Rice 1282
UNC Chapel Hill 1231
RPI 1172
Case Western 1000
Emory 631
Tufts 533
Wake Forest 325
Georgetown 282
Dartmouth 236
Harvey Mudd 72
Williams 66
Amherst 44
Swarthmore 34
Pomona 23</p>

2

<p>Someone else (may have been you) did an index of works cited (using ISIS Web of Science or Web of Knowledge) to count the number of people citing papers which came from these institutions-- a way to look not just at production but quality as well.</p>

<p>That number, per faculty, was a very interesting number indeed.</p>

<p>These numbers per faculty could be interesting, but it’s tough because what if someone who’s an engineer published a paper that was related to physics or astronomy? What if production is much higher or lower in other fields? What if many of these papers are published with faculty members who are researchers and not professors? What about the number of publications with undergraduates as authors?</p>

<p>Lots of good questions to ask, and a lot of information that’s hard to find. If you’re really into compiling numbers, these are some numbers I’d try and find out to get a more interesting comparison.</p>

<p>Perhaps more interesting than publications/faculty is publication/graduate student in that area. Having one PI lead a lab of 30 graduate students will result in a lot more work than a PI running a lab with 3 graduate students. Structures outside of just number and quality of faculty and far removed from undergraduates (less graduates in the lab may be a better experience for some, a worse experience for others) could have a huge effect.</p>

3

<p>It was my research job to go through academic publication databases like ScienceDirect and to download individual articles onto the desktop for systematic review…</p>

<p>Dude, there are many many more databases available other than ScienceDirect.</p>

<p>It is not even remotely relevant to choose one database like ScienceDirect and not consider the many others that are outthere. ScienceDirect through my experience is one of the most complete and comprehensive ones out there. Always had the articles I needed to download.</p>

<p>Number of scholarly publications is not useful. It must be considered in the context of the size of the department. There are departments such as Johns Hopkins that does not have the number of faculty members as Michigan, Wisconsin, Cornell, or Berkeley for example. Hopkins’, UC Santa Cruz, and Princeton’s research impact with respect to their size is tremendous.</p>

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4

<p>Only 934 articles came up for UC Santa Cruz in Science Direct for physics/astronomy. Are they a small department? </p>

<p>I am skeptical about the scholarly productivity of the physics/astronomy department at SUNY Stony Brook. It seems rated too highly in your quote. But, on the other hand, they had 2594 articles come up.</p>

5

<p>Isn’t this what the [Faculty</a> Scholarly Productivity Index](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/page.php?]Faculty”>http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/page.php?) measures?</p>

6

<p>I think the Faculty Productivity Index uses a complicated formula. It is more than just publications per faculty. It is produced by SUNY Stony Brook, by the way. They give you their top ten for free, you have to buy the rest I think.</p>

<p>for physics</p>

<p>1 Harvard U. 1.92
2 Johns Hopkins U. 1.9
3 New York U. 1.87
4 U. of California at Berkeley 1.84
5 California Institute of Technology 1.76
6 U. of California at Los Angeles 1.64
7 Stanford U. 1.62
8 U. of California at Santa Barbara 1.61
9 U. of Pennsylvania 1.59
10 U. of California at San Diego 1.54</p>

<p>modestmelody-good points. There is some noise in this data but I think it is still a useful approximation. It is not easy to get good information about individual programs. The databases are not available to everybody. It takes work to get the data into a meaningful form, like citations per faculty.</p>

7

<p>IEEE Xplore is a good database for engineering which permits searches by affiliation using boolean expressions (AND/OR)</p>

8

<p>SUNY Stony Brook operates the 64 campus SUNY-wide ‘Institute for Theoretical Physics’ formerly directed by physics Nobel Prize winner and renown physicist Dr. Chen Ning Yang from ‘Institute for Advanced Study’ in Princeton, NJ.</p>

<p>UC Santa Cruz manages UARC @ NASA Ames Research Centermuch in the same way Caltech manages JPL, Hopkins manages APL, Penn Sate ARL, etc…</p>

9

<p>Yeah, collegehelp, I wasn’t suggesting that this isn’t an interesting way, just that, like with most things, asking this question begs a lot of other interesting questions which are far more difficult to probe although they may be quite elucidating.</p>