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 background: First 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 measures: There 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 measures: In 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 diversity: Also 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 |