UC Santa Barbara remains the top-ranked public university in the United States and among the top five universities worldwide for research impact in engineering and physical sciences, as listed by the 2019 Leiden Rankings. This marked the fifth consecutive year that UCSB earned that distinction.
Compiled annually by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, the rankings are based on data from the Web of Science bibliographic database of Clarivate Analytics. The 2019 list includes more than 960 universities, taking into account Web of Science core publications from 2014 to 2017. Impact is determined by several indicators, including the average number of citations of the publications of a university, the proportion of publications that belong in the top 10 percent most frequently cited Web of Science publications, and the proportion that belong in top 1 percent most frequently cited publications.
When taking into account the proportion of the university’s scientific publications in the top 1 percent most frequently cited Web of Science core publications, UCSB ranks 5th worldwide and first among public institutions in terms of scientific research impact in the fields of physical sciences and engineering. Only Stanford, MIT, University of Cantabria in Spain, and Harvard ranked above UCSB. The University of Chicago, Yale, Princeton, UC Berkeley, and Cal Tech rounded out the top ten among universities worldwide with a publication output above 1,000 fractionally counted Web of Science core publications.
According to the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, the Leiden Ranking “provides indicators of scientific impact and collaboration and uses a more transparent methodology.” The ranking does not use data from reputational surveys, or data provided by the universities themselves, and employs bibliometric methods —quantitative analyses of patterns of publication — to analyze the impact of and collaboration by the top universities in the field of the sciences.
