In the latest analysis of the world’s top universities published by Times Higher Education (THE), UC Santa Cruz ranked third 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 2018, the analysis measured overall research influence based on the average number of citations per paper, using a database of almost 62 million citations to more than 12.4 million research publications published over five years, from 2012 to 2016.
With a citation score of 99.9, UC Santa Cruz is tied for third place with Stanford University. St. George’s University of London and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were tied for first. UC Berkeley ranked just behind UCSC and Stanford with a citation score of 99.8.
The 2018 rankings list the top 1,000 universities in the world, comparing them in five areas: teaching (the learning environment); research (volume, income, and reputation); citations (research influence); international outlook (staff, students, and research); and industry income (knowledge transfer).
The research influence indicator looks at the role of universities in spreading new knowledge and ideas. 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 2018 was 162 out of 1,000 institutions worldwide. In the United States, UC Santa Cruz ranked 55 out of 154 institutions.
