For the second successive year The University of Queensland has been recognised as the top university in the southern hemisphere for global research quality in the 2019 CWTS Leiden Rankings – as measured by the number of publications of a university belonging in the top 1 per cent of their field.
UQ ranked number one in Australia, number one in Oceania, number one in the southern hemisphere and 32nd in the world as measured by the highly-regarded international research quality indicator.
The rankings measured the scientific performance of more than 950 major universities worldwide in the years 2014-17.
Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Peter Høj said that maintaining its number one ranking within Australia displayed a commitment to high-quality research standards and output.
“In the ranked period, UQ contributed 179 publications in the top one per cent of the most frequently cited publications,” Professor Høj said.
“Those 179 were considered the cream of the crop of 11,997 publications in recognised journals contributed by UQ researchers and research teams.
“To put that in perspective, that’s almost exactly 250 publications a month in recognised journals contributed by UQ over four years.
“To be number one in Australia, Oceania and the southern hemisphere is fantastic validation of why leading researchers, educators and students choose to call UQ home.”
UQ’s number one positioning was calculated using fractional counting, ascertaining the number of university publications that, compared with other publications in the same field and in the same year, belong in the top 1 per cent most frequently cited.
Once again UQ was also Australia’s top-ranked university in the research category of life and earth sciences and number 9 in the world, as measured by the number of publications of a university belonging in the top 5 per cent of their field.
In the field of social sciences and humanities UQ was Australia’s top-ranked university and number 34 in the world, also as measured by the number of publications of a university belonging to the top per cent of their field.
CWTS introduced two new categories of indicators to its latest rankings – gender and open access.
The University of Queensland was within the top three universities in Australia for female-authored publications, total open access publications, and percent of publications which were open access.