Lancaster rises in global rankings
Lancaster University has been ranked at 264 – its highest position to date – in the 2005 Shanghai Jiaotong World Rankings of the world’s top 500 universities.
This table has become high profile in the national and international media and the Prime Minister has quoted from it extensively in his address to the EU Parliament on global competitiveness, earlier in the summer.
Institutions are measured against 6 criteria.
· Alumni winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals
· Faculty Staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals
· Highly cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories
· Research Output Articles published in Nature and Science
· Articles in Science Citation, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index
· Size of Institution Academic performance with respect to the size of an institution size.
Lancaster has done particularly well in the criteria of highly cited researchers and in having research articles publishes in Science and Nature.
Being designated as highly cited is particularly significant because this is a key measure of influence in science and technology, because when one researcher refers to the work of another, they are acknowledging the influence that work has had on their own.
Recently, 5 Lancaster University scientists have been listed as Highly Cited by the Institute of Scientific Information.
Professor Bill Davies (director of the Lancaster Environment Centre) is 1 of only 8 UK academics (out of 109) to be highly cited in the Plant and Animal Science category.
Professor Keith Beven and Professor Kevin Jones from Environmental Science are listed as highly cited in the Ecology and Environment category out of only 14 UK academics listed. No other 5* Environmental Science Departments in the UK were represented in the list.
Professor Peter Lea from Biological Science and Professor Gareth Roberts from Mathematics are also rated highly cited in the ISI list.
In another listing compiled by In-Cites, Professor Kevin Jones, who heads the Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology Group, has been listed as 4th out of 20 most cited scientists in Environment/Ecology 1992-2002.
The full listing for each year can be found on the Shanghai Jiaotong web-site.