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What Does it Mean that UCSB is Ranked Number 7 in the World in “ Research Impact ? ”

The Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University has published the Leiden Ranking for 2011/2012 that “measures the scientific performance of 500 major universities worldwide.” They rank universities by several distinct criteria, based on publications by authors affiliated with the university, the journals in which they publish, and citations to works written in these journals. By the indicator that they call “the most important impact indicator of the Leiden Ranking”, the University of California Santa Barbara is ranked as number 7 in the world. It is outranked only by MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Rice, Stanford, and Cal Tech. It outranks all of the other universities in the UC system, including Berkeley and UCLA. Can this be right? Has UCSB research really surged past that of Irvine, San Diego and Davis, not to mention UCLA, Berkeley, Yale, Chicago, and Michigan? If so, when did it happen and how did they do it? Even the most ebullient among us must be a trifle skeptical. My sources tell me that the Leiden group has a good reputation in the scientometrics community. The Leiden group’s discussion paper [1] and online methodological discussion http://www.leidenranking.com/methodology.aspx indicate that they were well aware of the pitfalls in ascribing authorial credit and university affiliation of authors and it appears that they went about this in a competent way. But even if they measured their index with great accuracy, there remains a question of what their index really measures. I will try to address that question here. One can find the Leiden rankings online at http://www.leidenranking. com/ranking.aspx . The principal source of data for these rankings is the Thomson Reuters Web of Science database, which counts journal citations found in all articles from about 10,000 academic journals. The Leiden study considered articles, letters, and reviews that were published between 2005 and 2009 in the sciences and the social sciences. Publications classified as arts and humanities were excluded. The authors of the study had to determine the institutions with which authors of each paper were affiliated. In cases of multiple authorship, they divided the credit to each author for an article by the number of authors listed for the article.