UBC Reports | Vol. 50 | No. 3 | Mar.
4, 2004
12th among North America’s public universities
By Hilary Thomson
The University of British Columbia is now ranked 35th among
the world’s 500 top universities, according to a study
cited in the Jan. 24 issue of the Economist.
Published by the European Commission, the executive body
of the European Union, and compiled by researchers at the
Shanghai Jiao Tong University Institute of Higher Education,
the 2003 academic ranking guide placed Harvard at number one
spot with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oxford University
and University of Cambridge in the top 10.
UBC and the University of Toronto (23rd place) are the only
Canadian universities in the top 75. The next Canadian university
in the list is McGill University, ranked 79th.
“Strong research-intensive universities, able to compete
and collaborate with the very best internationally, help Canada
take its place in a world where global scholarship must fuel
global citizenship,” said UBC President Martha Piper.
“Internationalization is a pillar of UBC’s strategic
plan, and this survey confirms that we are making great strides
in this area.”
The survey, published for the first time this year, is described
in the Economist article as a “painstaking ranking of
the world’s best universities.” It scores universities
on five evenly weighted indicators of academic and research
performance. They include the number of Nobel laureates produced
between 1911 and 2002, the number of highly cited researchers
and number of articles published in science and social science
journals. Universities are scored out of a possible maximum
of 100 points.
UBC’s highest individual score is in the category that
tallied articles cited in the Science Citation Index-expanded
and the Social Science Citation Index. Some of UBC’s
most-cited faculty members include economist Erwin Diewert,
geneticist Phil Hieter, and neuroscientists Edith and Patrick
McGeer.
For more information on the survey, visit http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm.
