“Big data” shows UVic is leading Canada in scientific impact

A data-driven analysis of scientific publications released May 20 by a leading European research centre puts UVic first in Canada for scientific impact in two broad fields—mathematics and computer science, and physical sciences and engineering. 

The ranking, produced by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, also places UVic third in the country among all universities for overall scientific impact. 

UVic was the top Canadian university without a medical school in four of the ranking’s five categories. “For UVic to place in the top tier is a remarkable achievement, and to do so without the lift in rankings that a medical school provides is all the more impressive,” says David Castle, UVic’s vice-president research.

The Leiden Rankings use multi-year Web of Science publication and citation data in the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities to measure the performance of 750 leading universities around the world. 

Leiden’s metrics are unusual because they rely solely on citation impact, and do not include the results of subjective survey responses by industry professionals and academics. 

Although the Leiden data can be sorted in many ways, UVic’s strong showing is based on Leiden’s default analysis, which measures scientific impact independently from a university’s size and focuses on publications in the top 10 per cent of most-frequently cited work—indicating the value of the work within the scholarly community.

Every year since its inception in 2011, the Leiden rankings have also highlighted an indelible characteristic of our campus—UVic’s global perspective. Our researchers publish a higher proportion of research based on international collaboration than any other Canadian university.

“There is a strong correlation between research excellence and the extent to which the research involves international collaboration,” notes Castle. “As these ranking results indicate, UVic is making a vital impact at home and abroad.”

Of the 750 world-leading universities that Leiden ranks, UVic is 116th for global impact in all sciences, 46th in math and computer science, and 71st in physical sciences and engineering.

Subject-area leadership, even by subjective measures

Another estimate of field-specific scientific leadership released last month, the QS World University Subject Rankings, suggests that opinions in the scientific community are beginning to catch up to the data—with UVic ranked among the world’s top 200 in six key academic fields:

• Earth and marine sciences
• English language and literature 
• Geography
• Law
• Philosophy  
• Psychology

Unlike the Leiden rankings, QS relies on academic and employer reputation surveys to measure leadership in each field, supplementing these surveys with citations and an impact-and-productivity indicator called the h-index.

No matter which measures are used, UVic’s performance across the disciplines continues to be very strong. QS scored the university for world-class performance in 29 of 36 fields it considers. (Most of the rest—including dentistry, pharmacy and veterinary sciences—are fields where UVic doesn’t have established programs.)

Why do rankings matter, anyway?

Research rankings like Leiden and QS are becoming increasingly important not just for potential students in selecting schools, but also in decision-making about research funding. 

That has led researchers—including several key scientists associated with the Leiden Centre for Science and Technology Studies—to issue a “manifesto” on the uses and abuses of research metrics, published last month in Nature, one of the world’s top scientific journals.  

Rather than a protest against rankings, the Leiden manifesto cites 10 key principles for the collection, analysis and practical uses of research metrics—recognizing that these values are informing professional evaluations of academics and are increasingly used to set priorities for decision-making at the national and regional levels. 

The authors of the manifesto argue for more care, transparency and accountability in the collection and promotion of metrics, and for strengthened standards in professional peer-review processes, as “assessors must not be tempted to cede decision-making to the numbers. Indicators must not substitute for informed judgement.”

“Rankings provide one line of evidence, among many others, about the research performance and impact of a university,” says Castle. “In this respect they tell part of the story of continued strengths and emerging areas of research excellence at UVic, all of which is attributable to inquisitive and driven researchers.”

To view the Leiden rankings, visit leidenranking.com

To view the QS rankings visit topuniversities.com/subject-rankings/2015