Issues in Scholarly Communication is a newsletter produced by Paula Kaufman, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, for the Illinois community. Entries from 2001-2005 newsletter are available.
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An August 2006 article in the international edition of Newsweek evaluated universities from around the world on their "globalness", providing a ranked list of the top 100. We're pleased to see that one of their criteria was the size of the library.
We evaluated schools on some of the measures used in well-known rankings published by Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Times of London Higher Education Survey. Fifty percent of the score came from equal parts of three measures used by Shanghai Jiatong: the number of highly-cited researchers in various academic fields, the number of articles published in Nature and Science, and the number of articles listed in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities indices. Another 40 percent of the score came from equal parts of four measures used by the Times: the percentage of international faculty, the percentage of international students, citations per faculty member (using ISI data), and the ratio of faculty to students. The final 10 percent came from library holdings (number of volumes).
The top 10 were:
1. Harvard University
2. Stanford University
3. Yale University
4. California Institute of Technology
5. University of California at Berkeley
6. University of Cambridge
7. Massachusetts Institute Technology
8. Oxford University
9. University of California at San Francisco
10. Columbia University
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign came in 48th, behind other big ten universities such as Michigan (11), U Chicago (20), Wisconsin (28), Minnesota (30), Northwestern (35), and Penn State (40). Others from the Big 10 that made the list of 100 included Michigan State (62), and Purdue (86).
Read the entire list of the 100 top global universities at MSNBC as well as a related story.
Note: You may also be interested in reading the Times of London's analysis of the "Top 100 Universities", worldwide. By their accounting, the University of Illinois ranked 58 in 2005 and 78 in 2006. According to this listing, the top universities are:
1. Harvard
2. Cambridge
3. Oxford
4. MIT
4. Yale
6. Stanford
7. California Institute of Technology
8. UC Berkeley
9. Imperial College, London
10. Princeton
11. University of Chicago
Posted by Katie Newman at November 21, 2006 1:59 PM
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