UCSB Places #7 in the World for Scientific Impact and Collaboration

May 29, 2015
UCSB

For the fourth year in a row UCSB has placed in the prestigious top 10 in Leiden University’s annual rankings of the 750 best major universities in the world, in terms of scientific impact and collaboration. This year UCSB ranked #7 on the list.

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.

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", than other university rankings. 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.

2015 Leiden Ranking