by ANGEL CALDERON

The 2020 edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking, released on 8 July, bodes well for Australian universities as there are now 31 Australian universities in the ranking ,compared to 26 in 2019.

As a national system, this is a remarkable achievement. Some 72 per cent of Australian universities are included in this ranking, compared to 35 per cent for the United Kingdom and 7 per cent for the United States. It reflects the homogenisation of Australia’s higher education and the legacy of the Dawkins reforms from thirty years ago, which made research and research training a key feature of what constitutes a university in Australia.

Australia’s five new entrants to this ranking are: Australian Catholic University, Charles Sturt University, Edith Cowan University, Uni Canberra and Victoria University. Readers can see how their institution rank globally on selected measures in the table below.

While Australia’s Go8 universities perform well across the various metrics of this ranking, every Australian university can make valid claims of resound success. This is because Leiden ranks on a set of 24 bibliometric indicators of scientific impact and collaboration. For a second consecutive year, Leiden has also produced a set of rankings on open access and gender diversity.

The Leiden Ranking also provides breakdowns for what it sees as the five main fields of science. This ranking is, like any other global ranking, a minefield of goodness. Just about everybody can extract a useful measure to boast about.

As rankings reflect past performance and time lag between investment (or lack of) and attainment of outcomes, any impact of the current health and economic crisis on bibliometric-specific rankings (like Leiden) will not be felt until 2022. However, some impact will be visible in the major rankings (QS and THE) next year, because of their student, staff and financial input measures.

Context and backgroundFirst published in 2008, the Leiden Ranking covered the 500 largest and most research-intensive universities in Europe and the wider world. The 2020 edition includes 213 more institutions compared to 963 in 2019. Overall, there are 1,176 institutions ranked globally from 65 countries.

It is produced by the Center for Science and Technology at Leiden University, in the Netherlands. It derives a set of impact and collaboration measures, but it does not produce an overall rank.

Leiden relies entirely on bibliometric measures, and as such is not dependent on institutional input like QS or THE or Best Global.

The Leiden Ranking truly reflects the work that researchers undertake and how their research endeavours have an overall impact on the economy and society. It also reflects how institutional research strategies shape research and research training activities across disciplines.

The Leiden Ranking contains two categories of metrics: Impact and Collaboration but it does not produce an overall rank.

Impact measuresThere are 13 measures of scientific impact, which include number of publications; number and proportion of publications which are in the top 1 per cent, 5 per cent, 10 per cent and 50 per cent most frequently cited; total and average number of citations as well as the total and the average number of citations of a publication, normalised for field and publication year.

Collaboration measures:There are 11 measures of scientific collaboration, which include; the number and the proportion of a university’s publications co-authored with one or more other institutions; the number and the proportion of publications with co-authors from other countries; the number and the proportion of publications co-authored with industry organisations.

There are also measures which look at the geographical distance of co-authorship, whether it is less than 100 kilometres or more than 5,000 kilometres between co-authors of a publication.

Open access measuresIn 2019, Leiden introduced a set of measures which examine the extent to which institutions have embraced open access publishing. The measures include whether an institution’s publications are published in an open access journal; publications in a subscription journal that are open access; publications in a journal that are open access without a license and publications in a journal that are also available in an open access repository.

The release of these metrics is a positive step towards an open environment in the scientific world.

Gender diversityAlso in 2019, Leiden introduced a set of measures designed to measure gender balance. The measures calculate the proportion of women among authors of papers from a university.

When the first set of results were published last year, they demonstrated institutions from Eastern Europe and Latin America had a great proportion of women authors compared to other world regions.

Angel Calderon is principal advisor, planning and research at RMIT

 

Global rank of Australian universities in 2020 Leiden Ranking
Selected measures of impact
Institution Number of publications Total citation count Mean normalized citation score Proportion publications in
in top 1% in top 5% in top 10% in top 50%
ACU 1113 991 109 94 75 110 98
Adelaide 185 136 130 64 112 124 172
ANU 209 198 145 153 157 153 167
Canberra 1164 1087 336 258 259 351 497
Charles Sturt 1062 1141 829 822 754 866 864
Curtin 271 250 196 143 151 164 207
Deakin 316 302 215 221 196 200 196
Edith Cowan 1149 986 208 87 101 234 434
Flinders 512 514 413 281 338 398 473
Griffith 291 289 233 228 236 246 278
James Cook 556 516 232 209 168 201 332
La Trobe 528 551 479 457 432 456 429
Macquarie 379 411 266 250 265 260 294
Melbourne 28 39 137 202 159 158 151
Monash 52 59 144 162 137 149 153
Murdoch 829 844 510 294 507 537 692
New England 960 1003 588 541 489 512 679
Newcastle 343 362 353 413 392 343 406
Queensland 37 45 126 127 126 131 113
QUT 327 320 271 252 310 308 221
RMIT 419 356 252 211 225 256 271
Swinburne 716 578 110 45 123 162 209
Sydney 32 57 146 158 136 142 181
Tasmania 452 454 390 474 300 314 334
UniSA 504 435 301 251 260 290 262
UNSW 53 63 152 133 173 163 134
UTS 423 318 64 54 53 56 114
UWA 176 205 265 241 256 278 232
Victoria 1045 881 238 195 214 210 329
Western Sydney 579 582 393 454 403 323 398
Wollongong 360 258 203 271 177 205 189

 

Global rank of Australian universities in 2020 Leiden Ranking
Selected measures of collaboration
Institution Number of collaborative publications % of collaborative publications
Total International Industry
ACU 768 34 381 987
Adelaide 148 254 270 582
ANU 169 304 112 834
Canberra 984 264 528 910
Charles Sturt 953 400 430 897
Curtin 217 206 205 717
Deakin 268 249 350 896
Edith Cowan 834 56 255 630
Flinders 449 388 468 632
Griffith 283 500 397 930
James Cook 464 157 252 683
La Trobe 406 177 504 850
Macquarie 306 337 302 837
Melbourne 22 226 291 442
Monash 29 123 271 587
Murdoch 714 223 369 462
New England 924 564 474 742
Newcastle 325 444 335 755
Queensland 32 362 264 597
QUT 282 285 299 791
RMIT 384 411 293 671
Swinburne 555 79 157 726
Sydney 26 307 280 590
Tasmania 386 349 303 610
UniSA 420 220 375 680
UNSW 46 369 286 637
UTS 315 113 116 703
UWA 112 71 174 549
Victoria 940 251 343 771
Western Sydney 454 148 300 949
Wollongong 328 358 199 697

 


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