Rockefeller tops global university ranking in measures of research excellence and patents

For the fourth consecutive year, Rockefeller secures top spots in an extensive, international ranking of universities, in categories related to scientific excellence and technology transfer. The findings were released this week by U-Multirank, an organization funded by the European Commission, and are based on data from more than 1,600 universities in 95 countries.

The report comes less than a month after results were released from another global survey of universities, the CWTS Leiden ranking, which placed Rockefeller in the top spot for scientific impact.

The latest assessment by U-Multirank positions Rockefeller as number one in research excellence—a quality measured by universities’ proportional contributions to the top 10 percent of the world’s most cited publications—above much larger institutions such as MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. Rockefeller also comes in first in a size-normalized ranking of awarded patents, a measure of the degree to which basic science discoveries are being transferred to economic actors such as biotech companies.

U-Multirank compares universities across five broad categories: teaching and learning, research, knowledge transfer, international orientation, and regional engagement. Its investigation draws data from a number of sources, including information supplied by bibliometric and patent databases.