October 26, 1998
Media Contact: Mario Aguilera, (619) 534-7572, [email protected]
REPORT RANKS UCSD RESEARCH AMONG THE NATION'S ELITE
The University of California, San Diego was rated among the nation's top "high impact" research universities between 1993 and 1997, according to a report produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI).
In the latest edition of ScienceWatch, ISI's newsletter devoted to tracking trends and performance in basic research, the top 100 federally funded U.S. universities are evaluated in 21 fields of science. The report ranks universities both by the number of papers produced and by "impact," those papers important enough to garner citations in succeeding research papers.
UC San Diego, one of only 11 universities to make the exclusive list of the "Highest Impact U.S. Universities," tied Cornell University, the University of Washington and UC Santa Barbara with six top ten appearances out of the 21 scientific fields. Harvard University led the way with 17 appearances, followed by Stanford University's 13 appearances and Caltech's 11 appearances. Yale University and the University of Michigan tied with nine, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at eight and UC Berkeley with seven.
"One of the most important measures of how we are doing is how often we're publishing and how often these papers are being quoted by others," said Mark Thiemens, Chair of UCSD's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Department. "So these are very important rankings and we're extremely pleased with the results."
In individual science fields, UCSD ranked third in the nation in plant and animal science. UCSD placed sixth in immunology, eighth in molecular biology and genetics and ninth in clinical medicine.
UCSD's high ranking follows the preceding edition of ScienceWatch, which reported UCSD as a leader in chemistry research.
In that report, UCSD was touted for producing the second highest number of chemistry papers citations in leading scientific journals between 1994 and 1996 amongst both academic and corporate research entities. UCSD was first among academic institutions, ahead of Caltech, Harvard University, MIT and Stanford University.
UCSD's 1,032 chemistry citations was second only to Scripps Research Institute. The University of California, Berkeley was third with 1,024 citations, followed by Caltech (852), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (845), DuPont Co. (829), the University of Cambridge (784), Harvard University (736), MIT (727) and the University of Washington (682).
In a separate category, the study also ranked institutions according to citation impact, those institutions producing the most highly-cited chemistry papers in the same three-year period. In that category, UCSD ranked fifth with a 93.8 impact rating. DuPont rated highest with a 118.4 rating, followed by the University of Washington, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and the University of Utah. Following UCSD in the impact category were Northwestern University, Scripps Research Institute, the University of California, San Francisco, Caltech and Stanford University.
K.C. Nicolaou, a researcher who splits time at UCSD and the Scripps Research Institute, was individually highlighted for producing the most high impact papers.
The Institute for Scientific Information, a Philadelphia-based research firm that tracks more than 16,000 international journals, books and proceedings, analyzed a variety of subfields for the chemistry study, including physical, inorganic and organic, materials science and engineering and polymer science. The report also included papers published in multidisciplinary journals such as Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
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