Rockefeller tops global ranking of research excellence

For the fifth year in a row, an extensive international ranking of research institutions gave Rockefeller top scores in several categories related to scientific impact and knowledge transfer. The findings were released today by U-Multirank, an organization funded by the European Commission, and are based on data from more than 1,700 universities in 96 countries.

The latest evaluation by U-Multirank positions Rockefeller as number one in several measures related to research excellence, including citation rate and top cited publications as measured by universities’ proportional contributions to the top 10 percent of the world’s most cited publications. In these categories, Rockefeller ranks above much larger institutions such as MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. The report also gives Rockefeller high scores for productivity: when the number of publications per year is adjusted for institutional size, Rockefeller tops the list.

In two key measures of knowledge transfer—a size-normalized ranking of awarded patents and publications cited in patents—Rockefeller comes in second. These rankings reflect 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.