UNIST Takes Strong Position in the 2017 CWTS Leiden Ranking

South Korea's Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) continues to be recognized as an elite engineering and science school worldwide, according to the latest Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) Leiden Ranking.

The CWTS Leiden Ranking is published by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University in the Netherlands and is based entirely on data provided by the Web of Science now run by Clarivate Analytics.

In the earlier edition of the Leiden Ranking, UNIST was incorrectly not included. The updated 2017 edition of the Leiden Ranking, which was released on the 19th of June, ranked UNIST as the top university in South Korea and 36th worldwide in regard to publication output for 2017 with its 2016 and 2011-2012 ranking and its quality rankings of number of publications (“P (top 10%”) and proportion of publications (“PP (top 10%”) of top 10% papers.

The 2017 CWTS Leiden Ranking system differs from others in that it separately reports scientific impact and collaboration rather than aggregating many dimensions of university performance into a single rank.

This year’s rankings offer insights into the scientific performance of 903 universities worldwide. They employ a sophisticated set of bibliometric indicators that provide significant statistics on the scientific impact of universities and on universities’ involvement in scientific collaboration.

The impact indicators in the Leiden Ranking can be calculated using either a full counting or a fractional counting method. The full counting method gives a full weight of one to each publication of a university. The fractional counting method gives less weight to collaborative publications than to non-collaborative ones.

In terms of the number and the proportion of scientific publications that, compared with other publications in the same field and in the same year, belong to the top 10% most frequently cited, UNIST (16%) was ranked as the nation’s top university by 2017 CWTS Leiden Ranking. This result was based on the Fractional Counting method and it was higher than those of POSTECH (12%), KAIST (11.3%), Ewha Womans University (9.1%), and Seoul National Univesity (9.0%).

Moreover, when they measured the rankings using the Full Counting method, UNIST has still remained strong at 112th among the best universities in the world. The Rockefeller University (29.1%) has kept its coveted ranking as the world’s top university, with MIT (26.5%) in second place, Standford University (23.6%) and Harvard University (23.6%) tied in third place, and Princeton University (23.2%) coming in fourth.