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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).