Rockefeller tops ranking of 1,300 universities in measures of scientific impact and productivity

In an international comparison of universities, Rockefeller University ranks first place in categories related to scientific impact and research productivity. The results, which were released last month by the European Commission–funded organization U-Multirank survey, incorporate data on more than 1,300 institutions in over 90 countries.

For the third consecutive year, Rockefeller took the survey’s top spot for scientific impact, based on the proportion of publications in the top 10 percent of those most frequently cited worldwide. The ranking, which placed Rockefeller above much larger institutions including MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, compares Rockefeller’s publications to those of other institutions published in the same field and in the same year. When the data were adjusted to reflect institutional size, Rockefeller also ranked first in research productivity, both in terms of the overall number of publications per year, and the citation rate of its publications.

Rockefeller also came in first place for the second year in a row in a size-normalized ranking of the number of patents awarded, and it came in second place for the number of its publications cited in patents.

Established by the European Commission in 2014, U-Multirank compares international universities across five broad dimensions: teaching and learning, research, knowledge transfer, international orientation, and regional engagement. The data included in the rankings are drawn from a number of sources, including information supplied by international bibliometric and patent databases.