<p>
</p>
<p>I am sorry but I failed to see that’s an adequte explanation. You said to make the list, you need to pubish hundreds of papers. Looking at those tables, it appear to me 300 is the cutoff. I see a wide range of number once you make the cutoff. Yale has 300+ engineering paper whereas CalTech has 1300+ paper. MIT is not on the list but I am sure it has more than CalTech. The method tries to be “fair” by normalizing it by citation. However, do you agree that citation/paper depends largely on how many related projects are done after one’s paper is published? I’d say it depends more on that than the quality of the paper. Well, your paper does need to be good enough to get published but that’s about it. When you do your research at the libraries, you are looking for papers that are relevant to your topic. When you see the match, all you care is if it’s relevant and support whatever you are trying to say. You don’t really care if the work was done at Harvard or Arizona State. You also don’t care about the quality of the work because once it’s published, it’s considered “legit” to be used. I am not saying the number is completely useless, I just see how it has its flaws. This ranking is essentially trying to rate the strength of faculty. An alternative way to find that out go to the departments’ website and look at their CVs (what major awards he/she receive? any/how many papers did he/she publish recently…etc) and compare them among different schools.</p>