University Times

Pitt held fast at No. 47 in the U.S. News and World Report 2017 Best Global Universities ranking and garnered a top-10 ranking among the best global universities for psychiatry and psychology, tying for No. 9 with the University of Pennsylvania.

The University shared its No. 47 spot with the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign in the third annual ranking, which was released Oct. 25.

The rankings were launched three years ago to benchmark U.S. schools against universities worldwide. This year’s ranking has expanded to 1,000 institutions in 65 countries — up from 750 universities in 57 countries in last year’s comparison.

Top-10 schools

U.S. schools occupied eight of the top 10 spots on the list, with the top three remaining unchanged from 2016.

Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, University of California-Berkeley and California Institute of Technology made up the top five, followed by the United Kingdom’s Oxford and Cambridge.

Princeton, Columbia and University of California-Los Angeles completed the top 10. Overall, 210 U.S. schools were ranked in the top 1,000.

Pennsylvania schools

Of the eight Pennsylvania schools that made the list, Penn ranked highest at No. 17, followed by Pitt at No. 47, Penn State at No. 56, Carnegie Mellon at No. 67, Thomas Jefferson University at No. 399, Temple at No. 403, Drexel at No. 405 and Lehigh at No. 619.

Methodology

According to U.S. News, the pool was created by including the top 200 schools in Clarivate Analytics’ global reputation survey and adding schools that had published the largest number of articles over the five-year period of 2010-14.

The overall rankings are based on reputation and bibliometric factors, using a dozen weighted indicators:

• Weighted at 12.5 percent each: global research reputation, regional research reputation and the number of publications among the 10 percent most cited.

• Weighted at 10 percent each: publications, normalized citation impact, percentage of total publications among the 10 percent most cited and international collaboration.

• Weighted at 7.5 percent: total citations.

• Weighted at 5 percent each: the number of highly cited papers among the top 1 percent most cited in their field and the percentage of total publications among the top 1 percent most highly cited.

• Weighted at 2.5 percent each: books and conferences.

Subject matter rankings

The 2017 rankings also compare schools in 22 subject areas.

Subject matter rankings are based on academic research performance in those subjects and are not rankings of an institution’s academic majors, departments or schools, according to U.S. News.

The University was ranked in 18 of 22 subject-specific rankings:

• No. 9 in psychiatry/psychology

• No. 17 in clinical medicine

• No. 23 in neuroscience and behavior

• No. 23 in pharmacology and toxicology

• No. 38 in arts and humanities

• No. 42 in immunology

• No. 42 in social sciences and public health

• No. 43 in biology and biochemistry

• No. 45 in microbiology

• No. 76 in molecular biology and genetics

• No. 102 in space science

• No. 129 in materials science

• No. 145 in chemistry

• No. 148 in computer science

• No. 154 in physics

• No. 170 in mathematics

• No. 186 in economics and business

• No. 324 in engineering

Pitt was not ranked in the subject areas of agricultural sciences, environment/ecology, geosciences or plant and animal science.

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The full rankings and methodology are posted at www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities.

—Kimberly K. Barlow