In the latest analysis of the world’s top universities published by Times Higher Education (THE), UC Santa Cruz ranked fourth 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, measured overall research influence based on the average number of citations per paper, using a database of more than 56 million citations to 11.9 million research publications published over five years, from 2011 to 2015.
For the first time this year, more than half a million books and book chapters have been included in the analysis, meaning that arts and humanities research is better represented than ever before. This year’s ranking includes institutions from 79 countries and represents an elite 5 percent of the world’s higher education institutions.
With a citation score of 99.8, UC Santa Cruz is tied for fourth place with UC Berkeley and California Institute of Technology. St. George’s University of London ranked first. Other institutions with high citation scores were Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both with scores of 99.9.
In describing their methodology, THE editors have called the evaluation of research influence their “flagship” indicator. As explained on the website 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.”
UCSC’s overall ranking in the THE World University Rankings for 2015–16 was 146 out of 980 institutions worldwide. In the United States, UC Santa Cruz ranked 53 out of 148 institutions.
