WSU plant, animal scientists ranked 13th internationally
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PULLMAN – Plant and animal scientists at Washington State University are among the most productive and most impactful in the world, according to rankings recently released by Thomson Reuters.
In its “Essential Science Indicators,” the business and professional information gathering company ranked WSU 13th in the world and sixth in the United States based on the number of journal articles produced by faculty scientists, but more importantly, on the number citations those articles generated. From January 1999 to June 2009, WSU researchers produced 2,473 scientific papers, which garnered 32,544 citations by other scientists.
“This ranking is by citations per paper among those institutions that have collected 25,000 or more citations in plant and animal sciences,” according to the company. “The ranking by citations per paper seeks to reveal heavy-hitters based on per paper influence, not mere output.”
That reflects the quality and scope of plant and animal science being conducted at WSU in the colleges of science, veterinary medicine and agricultural, human, and natural resources sciences, said Howard Grimes, WSU vice president for research.
“The fact that the science we’re producing is foundational to other work being done around the globe is especially important,” he said. “This speaks volumes about the kind of inquiry we’re tackling.”
Essential Science Indicators lists institutions ranked in the top 1 percent for a field over a given period, based on total citations. For the current version, 887 institutions are listed in the field of plant and animal sciences. Of those, just 40 collected 25,000 or more citations.
Other institutions in the Top 20 include University of California Berkeley, University of Washington, Cornell University, Purdue University and Iowa State University, as well as institutions from the United Kingdom, France, Japan and Germany.
