US News Engineering Rankings

bruno123
Sun, 03 May 2009 09:14:05 +0000

bruno, there are citations, and there are CITATIONS. It does not take much to write a paper worthy of citation. But the papers writen by faculty at schools like GT and Michigan are, on average, far lengthier and more impactful than papers written by faculty at say Duke or Rice.



Alexandre,

Are you in academia ? Do you follow the technical literature closely ? Are you a member of an editorial board or a frequent reviewer for any major journal ? I am just wondering how you can back up your claim that GT’s or UMich’s publications currently have “greater impact” than Duke’s or Rice’s.

Anyway, the FSP index doesn’t tell you which graduate program is the best in any given area. It tells you though which program is the ** most productive ** based, as I said, on universally recognized, objective measures of academic excellence such as publications per faculty and citations per faculty.

I guess that, if you wanted to criticize the validity of the FSP index, you should start by investigating the reliability of its database. If data on publications/citations are unreliable or placed under a category it ought not to be in, then there may genuine distortions in the rankings. Otherwise, I think it is a much better indicator of quality than USN&WR’s prestige poll.