Another World University Ranking

This one is coming at you from the Middle Eastern Technical University in Turkey. I found out about it because "California South University" was boasting that it was #72 in the 2014-5 version of this. I looked for them this year and found no record. (Not surprising.) #72 this year is the U. of Helsinki.

It appears to be science-centric and largely based on the citation rankings.

http://www.urapcenter.org/2017/world.php?q=MS0yNTAw

I like it because it doesn't merely rank the US "doctoral-research" universities and it covers the entire world. Unfortunately citation rankings for an entire institution are too blunt an instrument to capture strength in particular subjects, specialties and research problems.

Their top 30 are:

1. Harvard
2. U. Toronto (way to go Canucks!)
3. Oxford
4. U. Paris VI - Pierre and Marie Curie
5. Stanford
6. University College London
7. MIT
8. Johns Hopkins
9. Cambridge
10. UC Berkeley
11. U. Michigan
12. U. Washington
13. UCLA
14. U. Pennsylvania
15. Columbia
16. Imperial College London
17. U. Copenhagen
18. UCSD
19. U. Tokyo
20. Yale
21. UBC
22. U. Chicago
23. Cornell
24. UC San Francisco
25. Tsinghua U. (China)
26. U. Sydney
27. National U. Singapore
28. Duke
29. Peking U. (China)
30. U. Melbourne


My own San Francisco State came in at #1076 (nestled between Firat University in Turkey and Shenyang Pharmaceutical U. in China) and CSUDH at #2452 (out of 2500 ranked, barely making the cut).

University of South Africa was #1051. Central European University at #1710 (lower than I would have expected, perhaps because it emphasizes the social sciences over the natural sciences).

 

I'm a little surprised to see UCSD come in at 18. It's a big deal to crack to top 20.

 

Yeah, it is. UCSD is a very big deal on the west coast. Wikipedia says "UC San Diego faculty, researchers and alumni have won 25 Nobel Prizes, eight National Medals of Science, eight MacArthur Fellowships, two Pulitzer Prizes and three Fields Medals." UCSD is huge in Oceanography (this particular UC campus was built around the already existing Scripps Institute of Oceanography, the Pacific's Woods Hole). It's become huge over the years in molecular biology too, with the Scripps Research Institute (big research reputation, WASC accredited doctoral program and several Nobel Prize winners of their own), the Salk Institute (the polio vaccine guy, more Nobels and the UCSD runs a joint doctoral program with them) and Sanford-Burnham (1,000 scientists and staff, another WASC accredited PhD program, and my favorite California approved school back in the day) all located adjacent to UCSD's campus within walking distance, sharing seminars and research opportunities since everything's part of the synergistic internationally famous Torrey Mesa biological research community. Plus, it's a nice place for all those scientists to work:



Besides, you've gotta love UCSD for their Geisel (yep, Dr. Seuss) library (built in 1970 but still as futuristic as all hell).