Today CWTS released the 2018 edition of the Leiden Ranking. The CWTS Leiden Ranking 2018 offers important insights into the scientific performance of 938 universities from 55 different countries. The CWTS Leiden Ranking 2018 is based on Web of Science indexed publications from the period 2013–2016. Compared with the 2017 edition of the ranking, there has been a modest increase in the number of universities included in the ranking. Also, two new impact indicators have been added, the P(top 5%) and PP(top 5%) indicators.
Select, generate and explore
The Leiden Ranking enables you to select sophisticated bibliometric indicators, to generate results based on these indicators and to explore the results from three different perspectives. Best known is the traditional list view, in which you can rank universities according to a selected indicator. The Leiden Ranking offers two additional perspectives: the chart view and the map view. The chart view shows universities in a scatter plot, so that you can explore the performance of universities using two selected indicators. The map view shows universities in a world map and provides a geographical perspective on universities and their performance.
Multidimensional perspective
The Leiden Ranking stands for a multidimensional perspective on university performance. To read more about why this is crucial, please see our principles for the responsible use of university rankings. The default order of universities in the list view is based on the size of a university’s publication output. It is up to you to select the output, impact or collaboration indicator that you wish to use to rank universities. Size matters when comparing universities: performance can be viewed from an absolute or a relative perspective (the number versus the percentage of highly cited publications). That is why size-dependent and size-independent indicators are consistently presented together in the Leiden Ranking. This highlights that both types of indicators need to be taken into account.