Thomson Reuters’ most recent assessment lists the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the top 20 universities for research impact based on publications submitted by researchers.
More than 4,000 univer-sities worldwide were assessed, putting UW in the top 0.5 percent of universities.
“This documents what we’ve always known at UW-Madison,” Dean of the UW Graduate School Martin Cadwallader said in a statement. “Sometimes it’s hard to put numbers on influence, but among all the uni-versities in the world, these numbers show UW has immense impact on science and research in general.”
Thomson Reuters is a technological consultant for businesses “in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, scientific, health care and media markets,” according to their website. In a statement, Reuters said it measured just how immense the impact from research documents are among scientific researchers through a method known as citation counts.
When scientists mention the existing research on which they are building, they credit it through a citation. The more influential a study is in its field, the more citations it will have, so Reuters grouped scientists by both this number and by their home institution.
“A citation ranking is important,” said UW spokesperson Terry Devitt. “It is a measure of the impact of an individual’s research. It tells us how much is being used by other researchers.”
UW boasts a total of 50,016 papers that have been cited 760,091 times, averaging 15 or more citations per paper.
“[The ranking] is a snapshot in time of how influential the UW-Madison research portfolio is. Collectively, to have faculty in the top 20 [of all the world] is a reflection of the quality of research,” Devitt said.
