<p>Published in today's issue of the RECORD (<a href="http://record.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/8536.html)%5B/url%5D">http://record.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/8536.html)</a>, a WUSTL news magazine:</p>
<p>WUSTL earns top-10 rankings in 21 disciplines</p>
<p>Faculty scholarly productivity 7th highest in the nation</p>
<p>In three separate national ratings </p>
<p>Here's the rest of the article:</p>
<p>WUSTL earns top-10 rankings in 21 disciplines</p>
<p>Faculty scholarly productivity 7th highest in the nation</p>
<p>In three separate national ratings — faculty scholarly productivity, black student college graduation rates and the number of National Merit Scholars in the freshman class — Washington University ranks in the top 10.
WUSTL ranks as the seventh most productive large research university as measured by the faculty's scholarly productivity, as well as ranking in the top 10 in five broad areas and 21 specific disciplines, according to Academic Analytics' Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index (FSP Index), a new quantitative method for ranking doctoral programs at research universities.</p>
<p>In Academic Analytics "broad field rankings," WUSTL is ranked in the top 10 in five out of 11 broad field categories. The University programs in social and behavioral sciences rank third; in biological and biomedical sciences, fourth; in public administration and social services professions, tied at fifth; in humanities, sixth; and in business, tied for seventh.</p>
<p>"It's great to see Washington U's strengths being recognized accurately, although our high ratings should come as no surprise," said Robert E. Thach, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. "We have always stacked up exceedingly well in performance measures such as the number of papers and books published by our faculty, the numbers of citations of these works by other scholars, and so forth."</p>
<p>"What makes this new study so unusual is that it relies entirely on objective data available in the public domain," Thach continued. "Reputations, which are commonly distorted by a variety of biases and which take decades to build, are not considered. This enables recent improvements in unfamiliar institutions to be fully appreciated."</p>
<p>In "individual discipline rankings" — within the broad field categories — WUSTL ranks in the top 10 in 21 disciplines. In two of these disciplines, WUSTL ranks No. 1. They are ecology and evolutionary biology and political science.</p>
<p>WUSTL top-10 rankings for all 21 disciplines are:</p>
<p>Anthropology: 2
Biochemistry: 8
Bioinformatics: 7
Botany and plant biology: 3
Business administration: 3
Cell biology: 6
Communication sciences and disorders: 6
Developmental biology: 9
East Asian languages and cultures: 10
Ecology and evolutionary biology: 1
English: 4
Genetics: 10
Immunology: 6
Kinesiology and exercise science: 2
Microbiology: 4
Molecular biology: 4
Pathology: 4
Political science: 1
Social work: 3
The Chronicle of Higher Education, in its Jan. 12th cover story on Academic Analytics' annual index, provides a list of top-10 institutions in six aggregated fields. In those rankings, WUSTL is ranked fourth in two fields: psychology and social sciences. The University's political science department's No. 1 ranking was prominently displayed on the cover.</p>
<p>Academic Analytics' FSP Index is based on a set of statistical algorithms developed by Lawrence Martin, Ph.D., chief scientific consultant to Academic Analytics — a collaboration between faculty and researchers at the Stony Brook University and Educational Directories Unlimited. Martin is dean of the graduate school, associate provost for analysis and planning and professor of anthropology at Stony Brook.</p>
<p>The index measures the scholarly productivity of faculty based on their publications, citations and financial and honorary awards. These numbers are aggregated to evaluate programs, and program scores are aggregated to produce rankings of whole universities.</p>
<p>In its second year of analysis, Academic Analytics' data-gathering program included information from nearly 200,000 faculty members based at 354 institutions and representing 118 academic disciplines in nearly 7,300 Ph.D. programs throughout the country.</p>
<p>"What makes this new study so unusual is that it relies entirely on objective data available in the public domain," Thach continued. "Reputations, which are commonly distorted by a variety of biases and which take decades to build, are not considered. This enables recent improvements in unfamiliar institutions to be fully appreciated."</p>
<p>Good, so I'm assuming no other education institutions get to peer-rank Wash U.</p>
<p>Well-deserved. I think that the quality WashU's programs are evident even at the undergrad level.</p>
<p>sadly....even now people may not know where Washington University is located...</p>
<p>But this makes me proud to be an entering freshman at such a prestigious institution!</p>
<p>I wouldn't put too much credit in it.......</p>
<p><a href="http://academicanalytics.net/top20.html%5B/url%5D">http://academicanalytics.net/top20.html</a></p>
<p>Johnnydr, if you mean the top 20 charts, you have to look at the last page of the pdf under "Large Research Universities", since that is what WashU fits under. Here are the rankings: </p>
<p>1
Harvard University</p>
<p>2.5
California Institute of Technology
University of California - San Francisco</p>
<p>4
Massachusetts Institute of Technology</p>
<p>5
Yale University</p>
<p>6
Carnegie Mellon University</p>
<p>7
Washington University St. Louis</p>
<p>8
Vanderbilt University</p>
<p>9
Johns Hopkins University</p>
<p>10
Duke University</p>
<p>11
University of Pennsylvania</p>
<p>13
Princeton University</p>
<p>13
University of California - Berkeley</p>
<p>14
University of Wisconsin - Madison</p>
<p>16
New York University</p>
<p>16
Stanford University</p>
<p>17
University of Washington at Seattle</p>
<p>18
University of Virginia - Main Campus</p>
<p>19
SUNY at Stony Brook</p>
<p>21
Cornell University - Endowed Colleges</p>
<p>21
Dartmouth College</p>
<p>According to these rankings North Carolina State is better ranked than MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Illinois, and Gatech in Aeronautical (Aerospace) Engineering. Don't make me laugh. Rice better than Carnegie Mellon in Computer science. Washu better than Wharton (Upenn) in Business, hard to believe</p>
<p>Shownethedata:
Wash U #1 in Political Science, even funnier.</p>
<p>College2go, have you read the methodology of the study and the article on the Chronicle of Higher Education about this ranking before you made such uninformed comments? </p>
<p>The ranking is a snapshot of faculty research productivity in the year 2005, (note this is for one year only). The research output (as measured by publications, citations, grants, awards, etc.) per faculty member in North Carolina State was better than MIT in 2005 --- I don't think why this is laughable.
WashU's political science was the most productive in the country -- that's the fact. You can laugh whatever you want. </p>
<p>By the way, do you know how many senior full professors at Wharton stopped publishing papers many years ago?? Those people have done amazing jobs in the past, but not now. This paprticular study does not count past glories. </p>
<p>--- Hope this help you to understand the ranking.</p>
<p>Often, rankings are based on reputation of senior faculty who may or may not be very active in any given year. This ranking, on the other hand, measures how active/productive the professors are in a given year, regardless whether they are stars or not in their fields. The irony is the newbies/assistant profs are often the most productive because they tend to be the most ambitious or because they are pressured by the "published or perished" policy.</p>
<p>Isn't it a shame that universities' reputations are not built on the quality of their TEACHING!</p>
<p>I believe LAC's reputations are built on their quality of teaching and the placements of their graduates. Washu, like Harvard, CMU, MIT, compete in the Research Universities category.</p>
<p>One of my professors in MIT said that he likes to teach his class early in the morning, because when he awakes, he likes to do his research.</p>
<p>The economics rankings look odd too, Hopkins ahead of Princeton and Chicago.
I understand that this is the result of an objective formula, but many formulas are possible- are publications in all journals weighted equally, or are they weighted by the journal's impact factor? Do the citation counts include all journals, or only good ones? What is the relative weight on citations vs publications? And so on. And how to account for differences in department size? This scheme counts per-faculty publications; would a department of only 1 person, highly productive, really be as good for most purposes as a department of that same star plus a few decent but less stellar colleagues?</p>
<p>To play devil's advocate, what is your own justification for the quality of Princeton and Chicago's programs? : )</p>
<p>criteria:
a) placement of graduate students - I'm sure Princeton and Chicago do better on this</p>
<p>b) total publications in the top 5 journals (AER, Econometrica, JPE, QJE, RES)
here I'm sure Princeton is ahead of Hopkins, and Chicago probably is too.</p>
<p>It would be interesting to see per-capita publications in top 5 journals; this would help Hopkins, which is smaller than the others. </p>
<p>c) reputation/quality of faculty : this does reflect past publications as well as recent ones, but I still think it has some relevance.</p>
<p>hey, so another article came out about this. Apparently these rankings have to do with the schools' doctoral programs, not undergraduate.</p>
<p>It's important to note, though, that a number of professors (excluding those in professional schools) that teach at the graduate level also teach undergrads.</p>
<p>So Wash U is up at the top for number of National Merit Finalists. Does Wash U give any scholarship money for National Merit Finalist Standing?</p>
<p>$2000 a year, if I remember correctly</p>