Russian and Saudi Arabian universities have been found to be among the most collaborative universities in the world, according to the Leiden Ranking, compiled by Leiden University in the Netherlands.
In the 2013 collaboration ranking, which is based on publication data from 2008-11, Saint Petersburg State University came first and Lomonosov Moscow State University was fourth. King Saud University in Saudi Arabia was second, followed by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK.
The Leiden collaboration ranking compares how universities cooperate in their research papers, using the proportion of the publications each university produces that have co-authors from at least two countries.
This year the Leiden team included for the first time a ranking of which universities published the most papers with industrial partners. On this list, Dutch technical universities took the top two spots. In the top 10, five of the universities were Scandinavian, two were Japanese, and only one was American.
However, when ranking universities the traditional way—according to citation output—institutions in the United States and Netherlands are in the lead. The citations ranking compares institutions based on how many of their publications are in the top 10 per cent of the most cited publications in their field. Massachusetts Institute of Technology came first on this list, which included 57 US universities in the top 100.
The Leiden ranking, which was first published in 2011, uses data from Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science database, counting research articles and reviews. Ludo Waltman, one of the researchers working on the Leiden ranking, says the 2013 ranking was based on about three million publications.
His team at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands aims to produce a more transparent ranking than its competitors, the Shanghai Jiaotong and the Times Higher Education rankings. While other rankings combine various types of qualitative and quantitative data to make a single list, the Leiden ranking only uses data on publications, Waltman explains.
The team is still refining their methods. “We are continuously investigating how to improve this methodology, how to make it as accurate as possible,” says Waltman.