Top Research Universities in the 2005 Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index

The 2005 index compiles overall institutional rankings on 166 large research universities, which include 15 or more Ph.D. programs, as well as 61 smaller research universities, which contain between one and 14 Ph.D. programs. (Related article)

How The Index Works

The 2005 Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, by Academic Analytics, a company owned partially by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, ranks 7,294 individual doctoral programs in 104 disciplines at 354 institutions. It also ranks institutions in broader categories, like the humanities and biological sciences, as well as institutions as a whole.

Institutions are categorized as large research universities (those with 15 or more Ph.D. programs) and small research universities.

For a program to be included in the 2005 index, it must have 10 or more faculty members, or, if it has fewer, it must have one-half the median number of faculty members for a program in that discipline.

The index examines faculty members who are listed on a Ph.D. program's Web sites, and includes a total of 255,475 names. A professor listed in both history and American studies would be counted twice. But at the next level of aggregation (the humanities in this case), the professor would be counted only once. The index creators call this "de-duplication." The total number of actual faculty members rated by the index is 177,816.

The productivity of each named faculty member is measured, although the data are aggregated before being published. Faculty members can be judged on as many as three factors, depending on the most important variables in the given discipline: publications, which can include the number of books and journal articles published as well as citations of journal articles; federal-grant dollars awarded; and honors and awards.

For each discipline, Academic Analytics assigns a weight to each variable. Publications, which include journal articles, citations of those articles, and in some cases, books, count as 60 points out of 100. For books to be included, more than 10 percent of the programs in that discipline must have had at least one book published by a faculty member. (For instance, books are not counted in chemical engineering.)

Books that were published from 2001 to 2005 were recorded using Amazon.com's database. When books are included, their weight is five times that of journal articles. Journal articles are counted for the years 2003, 2004, and 2005. The index uses Scopus, an abstract-and-citation database that covers more than 15,000 peer-reviewed journals.

Grants count as 30 points out of the 100, if they meet a threshold of importance in a particular discipline — that more than 50 percent of the programs in that discipline have received a federal grant. Grant data from 2003, 2004, and 2005 were collected from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, along with some from the Department of Energy.

The NEH and Energy Department grants were counted as awards and honors, however, because of the limited information on grants made available by the Energy Department and the very small number of grants awarded by the NEH.

Awards and honors count as 10 points out of 100, as long as more than 10 percent of the programs in the discipline have received awards. Data are collected from the Web sites of 55 organizations that grant awards and honors and are matched to names and programs.

Awards considered more prestigious are given more weight than others. For example, most awards, like Fulbrights, are counted only if they were awarded between 2001 and 2006. But a Nobel Prize can be counted in the 2005 index if it was awarded within the past 50 years.

If one or more variables are not used in the calculation of faculty productivity, that part of the equation is removed and the point scale reduced accordingly. So if honors are not included, the total possible score is reduced to 90 from 100. Institutions that pay for the data have the ability to reweight the variables in any category, according to their preferences, so they can use the raw data as they please.

The faculty's scholarly productivity in each program is expressed as a z-score, a statistical measure that reveals how far and in what direction a value is from the mean. The z-score allows the performance of programs to be compared across disciplines. A z-score of zero indicates that the program is at the national mean for the discipline; a z-score of 1 indicates that the program is one standard deviation unit higher than the national mean.