Alejandro brings my attention to ScienceWatch’s list of most-cited institutions in science.
This is the list of the ‘top’ twenty institutions out of just over four thousand. For some value of ‘top’, he says snarkily. Now, we know there are serious problems with citation metrics, but essentially it’s all we’ve got to go on, so it’s not a bad list.
The Most-Cited Institutions Overall, 1999-2009 (Thomson)
| Rank | Institution | Citations | Papers | Citations Per Paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | HARVARD UNIV | 95,291 | 2,597,786 | 27.26 |
| 2 | MAX PLANCK SOCIETY | 69,373 | 1,366,087 | 19.69 |
| 3 | JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV | 54,022 | 1,222,166 | 22.62 |
| 4 | UNIV WASHINGTON | 54,198 | 1,147,283 | 21.17 |
| 5 | STANFORD UNIV | 48,846 | 1,138,795 | 23.31 |
| 6 | UNIV CALIF LOS ANGELES | 55,237 | 1,077,069 | 19.5 |
| 7 | UNIV MICHIGAN | 54,612 | 948,621 | 17.37 |
| 8 | UNIV CALIF BERKELEY | 46,984 | 945,817 | 20.13 |
| 9 | UNIV CALIF SAN FRANCISCO | 36,106 | 939,302 | 26.02 |
| 10 | UNIV PENN | 46,235 | 931,399 | 20.14 |
| 11 | UNIV TOKYO | 68,840 | 913,896 | 13.28 |
| 12 | UNIV CALIF SAN DIEGO | 40,789 | 899,832 | 22.06 |
| 13 | UNIV TORONTO | 55,163 | 861,243 | 15.61 |
| 14 | UCL | 46,882 | 860,117 | 18.35 |
| 15 | COLUMBIA UNIV | 43,302 | 858,073 | 19.82 |
| 16 | YALE UNIV | 36,857 | 833,467 | 22.61 |
| 17 | MIT | 35,247 | 832,439 | 23.62 |
| 18 | UNIV CAMBRIDGE | 43,017 | 811,673 | 18.87 |
| 19 | UNIV OXFORD | 40,494 | 766,577 | 18.93 |
| 20 | UNIV WISCONSIN | 50,016 | 760,091 | 15.2 |
Or is it?
Because as you know, we give the articles evaluated at F1000 a score. And it has not escaped our notice that once you start doing such a thing, you can start asking interesting questions. Admittedly we only look at biology and medicine (so far…), but according to this Excel spreadsheet I’ve just opened we have over five thousand unique institutions in our database. Hmm… I wonder if we might be doing anything with that?

And talking of authors I’d like to take this opportunity to shout out to my friend Åsa, whose recent work on inhibiting protein synthesis in secondary pneumonia was evaluated on F1000 Medicine (and who might one day get a nonymous blog cough).

