US News Engineering Rankings

gthopeful
Sun, 03 May 2009 13:52:40 +0000

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.



I’m fairly familiar with GT (hence my name). Here I would say there are many more people than at many other universities I have known that subscribe to the “quality over quantity” philosophy in publishing. In fact, it is not uncommon to have only 2 or 3 publications by the time of getting the PhD, but those are publications that took at least a year or two of gathering information and are quite comprehensive. For example, I know one person who graduated recently with two publications, but one of them was the most downloaded article for the entire year from all the journals published by this particular well-respected publisher in this person’s broad area.

You might think that taking a year to gather the data for a journal article is customary but this is not so. It seems more prevalent amongst people educated in eastern countries, but even something as simple as a few microscope images will get published in an OK journal if they show something anomalous (with the right spin, of course), and so some professors use this to publish 3-5 times a year per student. I see plenty of cases where professors have hundreds of publications by mid-career (in their 50’s).



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.



As far as I can tell, that index does not distinguish between journals and weights quite highly (60%) factors such as number of publications and citations per faculty. There is a big difference between publishing in Science and Physical Review Q, and it isn’t necessarily true that the Science article will get that many more citations because it is customary to cite papers within a journal you want to publish in to appease the editors. Many more people publish in lower tier journals than upper tier. Further, there is a difference between the placement of a citation in an article. Typically the majority of citations in a paper is in the introduction paragraph where they are not specifically referenced but are more or less (once again) placed to placate potential reviewers and editors and signify no real impact.

Using these objective metrics means that people can scheme on how to inflate their score using them, but at least if you use soft metrics like PA you have to at least do something noteworthy.