UofT among the world’s best universities for cited research papers

Toronto, ON – The University of Toronto is among the world’s best universities for citations for its research, says ScienceWatch.com, an organization that tracks and analyzes basic research impact at institutions around the world.

UofT finished 13th overall for papers cited from January 1, 1999 to April 30, 2009. Placing first was Harvard University, followed by Max Planck Society and Johns Hopkins University. Notable institutions ranking below UofT included Oxford, MIT, Yale and Cambridge.

This finding comes a week after UofT finished 11th in rankings compiled by the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT), which measures the productivity, impact and excellence of published scientific papers.

“Coming on the heels of UofT’s ranking in HEEACT, this finding by ScienceWatch also confirms that our researchers have a huge impact and compete with the best in the world,” says Professor Paul Young, vice president research for the University of Toronto. “Based purely on the number of citations for papers published, it’s a further quantitative affirmation of our world-class research performance.”

ScienceWatch.com compiles information from research papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals. The data covers 22 fields of study, including chemistry, engineering, economics and business, space science and mathematics. The organization monitors 4,050 of the world’s most cited institutions.

In its rankings, ScienceWatch.com found that UofT had a total of 55,163 papers cited a total of 861,243 times – an average of 15.61 citations per paper – over the past 10 years. It specifically mentions UofT scientists Frances Shepherd, Charles Boone and Geoffrey Ozin as researchers with highly cited papers and features them on its site.

Dr Shepherd is one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of clinical trials for lung cancer. Professor Ozin’s award-winning work in inorganic materials chemistry has been recognized around the world and he holds the Canada Research Chair in Materials Chemistry. Dr Boone heads up a laboratory that is focussed on developing and applying functional genomics techniques to a number of biological problems.