The rankings were reported in the fall edition of ScienceWatch, ISI's newsletter devoted to tracking trends and performance in basic research. The report ranks universities in 21 fields in the biological, physical, and social sciences, both by the number of papers produced and by "impact," i.e. those papers important enough to garner citations in succeeding research papers.
According to ScienceWatch, the top ten "highest impact" U.S. universities (from 1997-2001) are: Harvard (1); Stanford (2); MIT (3); UCSD (4); Yale University (5); UC Berkeley (6); Columbia University (7); Caltech (8); University of Michigan (9); and Duke University (10). In terms of the number of citations in the 21 fields, UCSD tied with MIT with 9 appearances, preceded by Harvard with 15 appearances and Stanford with 11 and followed by Yale, UC Berkeley, and Columbia with 8 appearances.
In the 21 fields examined, UCSD ranked highest in: clinical medicine (2); pharmacology (3); molecular biology and genetics (4); plant and animal sciences (3); chemistry (5); biology and biochemistry (8); geosciences (7); computer science (10); and psychology and psychiatry (10).
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