The Leiden ranking is a University ranking system developed by the university of Leiden, The Netherlands.
The ranking lists the top
500 universities based on publications on the Web of Science (WoS)
website, a scientific publication database run by Thomson Reuters.
The Leiden Ranking system looks at publications in multiple languages
to avoid an English bias. Publications on arts and humanities are not
used in the ranking, because there is no sufficient data available
for in the Web of Science databases to rank universities on it.
The ranking is for the
2011-2012 period, but is based on publications on WoS between 2005
and 2009. This probably has to do with the period needed for articles
to 'mature' so their impact can be measured through citations.
The top 10 in the Leiden
Ranking is made up completely of U.S. based universities, who are
apparently the publication grandmasters on Web of Science.
The Leiden Ranking thus
gives useful information on universities, but only about scientific
publications, and only through one source of publications. It is in
that sense similar to the rankings based on web presence of
universities only, with the difference that the number of
publications probably is a much better indicator of university
quality than having a nice website is.
What they look at:
| Impact of publications
on WoS | Collaboration indicators on WoS |
What they came up with:
1. MIT
2. Princeton University
3. Harvard University
4. Rice University
5. Stanford University
6. Caltech
7. Univ. California -
Santa Barbara
8. Univ. California -
Berkeley
9. Carnegie Mellon
University
10.University of
California - San Francisco
The complete 500
institution-long list can be found on the Leiden Ranking website.
