Another look at Leiden reveals more leaders

Learned readers were quick to point that the Leiden research output ranking in CMM Friday is only one, of quite a few, stories of university achievement in the data. They point out the research big beasts are performance leaders because they have so many researchers. But they suggest things change when the proportion of a university’s publications in a given field are cited in the top 10 per cent of publications in it. It does, a bit.

On this count UTS (14.6 per cent) is top in Australia, just ahead of ANU (13.6 per cent) followed by nearly all the Group of Eight, Uni Adelaide (13.3 per cent), Uni Queensland (13.2 per cent), Uni Melbourne (13 per cent), Uni Sydney (12.9 per cent) and UNSW (12.9 per cent). James Cook U and Deakin U (12.5 per cent), shade out Monash U, (12.4 per cent).

None of the 25 Aus unis on the list are under 10 per cent on this measure which is interesting. For a start, it shows how the research-strong sub-system is respectably productive on an international comparison, some 23 of Leiden’s overall research top 100 rate under 10 per cent on this measure.

And then there is output per staffer – on Leiden, as just about all research rankings it is the Group of Eight and daylight for overall publications in top rated journals. But not on citations.

Back in 2017 Xin Gu and Karen Blackmore (both Uni Newcastle)  crunched   the bibliometrics at three representative Australian universities and found productivity in the three converged between 2009 and 2014 while quality did not change.