(17 April 2013) Today, CWTS Leiden University launches the Leiden Ranking 2013. The ranking measures the scientific performance of 500 major universities worldwide, using a sophisticated set of bibliometric indicators. It is presented via an intuitive and user-friendly website interface: www.leidenranking.com.
Source normalization is a new CWTS-developed approach that has the advantage of being independent of classification systems that organize publications or journals into fields. This approach corrects field differences by analyzing referencing behaviour at the level of individual publications.
This new version of the ranking offers comparison of scientific performance among universities over five broad scientific disciplines in the following dimensions: impact, output and collaboration.
The US is still the dominant player in the scientific world. As in previous years MIT is the university whose publications have the highest citation impact. The top 100 list consists of universities from thirteen countries. However, new centres of science are emerging in China (37, six newcomers), Iran (five newcomers) and Brazil (10, two newcomers).
Universities outside the US and Europe are becoming serious players in the field, not only in number of publications but also in scientific impact. For the first time two Chinese universities Nankai (rank 53) and Hunan (rank 55) overtake the best – in terms of impact – universities in the Netherlands (Leiden, rank 58).
The 2013 survey results are here: http://www.leidenranking.com.
