Canberra, Friday 31 August, 2001

ANU academics' research impact in world's top rank

The "research impact" of papers written by Australian National University academics in 17 major fields ranks in the top 1% of the world.

ANU leads in the research impact of papers in the environmental sciences and is in the top three in mathematics.

The University joins Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, MIT, Caltech, Cambridge, Oxford and other major US and British universities in the top rank.

ANU's position was identified when independent data on the research impact of its academics' papers were compared with similar international data contained in a study by the British newspaper, The Guardian.

The Guardian study used data provided by the Institute for Scientific Information, a US company that maintains databases of academic journals, to rank the research quality of universities and other institutions in Europe and the United States. The study ranked the universities according to how many papers their academic staff published and how often those papers were cited in other publications. The "research impact" was defined as the average number of citations per paper.

"When we compared independent data on publications by our academics against the results for the major university participants in The Guardian's study, we were delighted to be able to confrim that the impact of our research is among the best in the world," ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Chubb said today.

"In 17 of the 22 fields, ANU has enough citations to rank in the top 1% by total citations to its papers."

The results reinforced Asiaweek's 2000 rating of ANU as the top Australian university and its inclusion last year with only Oxford, Harvard, Princeton and New York Universities in Blackwell publishers' The Philosophical Gourmet Report's Group 1 rating for philosophy. In 1998, the Higher Education Supplement of The Times of London listed ANU with Oxford, Cambridge, The Sorbonne, Harvard, Stanford, and MIT.

"The Australian National University was established with a special national role to advance Australian research," Professor Chubb said. "These world ratings demonstrate that it continues to achieve that goal and to provide an outstanding environment for research and teaching that is without rival in Australia."

For more information: ANU's 24-hour media contact: (02) 6125 6125

No:76/2001

© 2000 Marketing & Communications Division,
The Australian National University.
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Last Modified Tue, July 16, 2002