<p>I no longer post on the BU board because my kids have now passed through. I do post on the U of Rochester board because my last is in school there. This is something I posted there, with a few changes:</p>
<p>A brand new ThomsonReuters study on the top research schools just came out. TR’s methodology was to look at schools which generate something like 2000 articles a year, meaning major research schools, and then rank them by how often that work is cited, meaning they use references and relations as a proxy for importance (like the original idea for Google). A score of 1.0 is average. </p>
<p>UR is listed in the email as 17th but it’s actually in a tie for 15th-17th with Yale and Boston University with scores of 1.71. The top schools are MIT and CalTech. 4 schools hit 2.0 but 10th place is in the 1.7 to 1.8 range. If you want to translate this roughly into percentages, this means BU’s and UR’s research is over 70% more likely to be cited than research at the average large research producing school in the US. That is impressive.</p>
<p>This is big name company because the other schools are either the top prestige schools and/or are very big - like U of Washington (48k total enrollment) and Colorado (over 30k undergrad). Perhaps the only real surprise is UC San Francisco; Berkeley is separately listed, as is UC San Diego, Santa Barbara & UCLA - something that one would hope would give pause to California politicians who want to cut university funding even more because they have 5 UC schools listed.</p>
<p>The rest of the list is Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, Chicago, Penn, Johns Hopkins & Columbia. </p>
<p>You can also see the most prolific publishing schools in another chart. Neither BU nor UR is on that one, but you can see that the California schools are very prolific, as is Washington and Oregon. This makes both BU’s and UR’s performance more impressive because they didn’t have as large a base of articles to be cited. </p>
<p>The study is free to download if you register with them.</p>