In the latest analysis of the world’s top universities published by Times Higher Education (THE), UC Santa Cruz ranked second in research influence as measured by the number of times its faculty’s published work is cited by scholars around the world.
Published as part of the THE World University Rankings 2015–16, the analysis, conducted by Elsevier, measured overall research influence based on the average number of citations per paper, using a database of more than 51 million citations to 11.3 million journal articles published over five years, from 2010 to 2014.
With a citation score of 99.9, UC Santa Cruz is tied for second place with Stanford University. St. George’s University of London ranked first. Other institutions with high citation scores were California Institute of Technology and Harvard University, both at 99.8.
In describing their methodology, THE editors have called the evaluation of research influence their “flagship” indicator. As explained on the web site for the World University Rankings, “the citations help to show us how much each university is contributing to the sum of human knowledge: they tell us whose research has stood out, has been picked up and built on by other scholars and, most importantly, has been shared around the global scholarly community to expand the boundaries of our understanding, irrespective of discipline.”
THE has also ranked UC Santa Cruz eighth overall among the top universities in the world under 50 years old. UCSC’s overall ranking in the THE World University Rankings for 2015–16 was 144th.
