Top Research Universities Faculty Scholarly Productivity
Index
The 2007 index compiles overall institutional rankings on 375
universities that offer the Ph.D. degree.
Mathematics - 2007
* An institution may appear more
than once if the discipline is related to more than one
department. |
How The Index Works
The index examines faculty members who are listed on a Ph.D.
program's Web sites, and includes a total of 217,254 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 164,843.
The productivity of each faculty member is measured, although the
data are aggregated before being published. Faculty members can be
judged on as many as five factors, depending on the most important
variables in the given discipline: books published; journal
publications; 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 many cases, books, count as 60 points out of
100. Books are included in six of the eleven broad fields: Business;
Education; Family, Consumer and Human Sciences; Health Professions
Sciences; Humanities; and Social and Behavioral Sciences but not in
Agricultural Sciences; Biological and Biomedical Sciences;
Engineering; Natural Resources and Conservation; and Physical and
Mathematical Sciences Books that were published from 2002 to 2006
were recorded using Baker and Taylor's database. When books are
included, their weight is five times that of journal articles for
the Humanities and three times that of a journal article in other
broad fields. Journal articles are counted for the years 2004, 2005,
and 2006. Citation counts cover a four year span so refer to
citations to articles published for the years 2003, 2004, 2005 and
2006. 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
10 percent of the programs in that discipline have received a
federal grant. Grant data from 2004, 2005, and 2006 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, NOAA,
and from three programs in the Department of Energy.
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 357 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 2002 and 2006. But a Nobel Prize can be
counted in the 2006-07 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. Starting with FSP 2006-07,
subscribers to Academic Analytics will also have the option to
obtain the complete dataset for disciplines of interest to them, so
they can use the raw data as they please. For more information about
the data, contact Academic
Analytics.
The faculty's scholarly productivity in each program is expressed
as a z-score, a statistical measure (in standard deviation units)
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.