Leiden
Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) has developed a new ranking list based exclusively on bibliometric indicators. In early 2007, the CWTS presented its ranking results for the 100 European universities with the largest number of scientific publications. This ranking list proposes four different indicators, from 2010 an additional fifth one, each resulting in a different ranking. The rankings are compiled every 2 years both for a European and the World-wide ranges.
Indicators and Methodology
The Leiden ranking benefits from all experiences and know-how available at CWTS: very accurate definition and ‘unification’ of universities worldwide; corrections for practically all errors and inconsistencies in the raw publication and citation data; thorough methodology based on 20 years of experience in research performance analysis; multiple-indicator approach. This latter point is very important: on the basis of the same data and the same technical and methodological starting points, different types of impact-indicators can be constructed, for instance one focusing entirely on impact, and another in which also scale (size of the institution) is taken in to account. Rankings based on these different indicators are not the same, although they originate from exactly the same data. Moreover, rankings are strongly influenced by the size-threshold used to define the set of universities for which the ranking is calculated.
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Impact indicators |
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| MCS (mean citation score) | The average number of citations of the publications of a university.
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| MNCS (mean normalized citation score) | The average number of citations of the publications of a university, normalized for field differences and publication year. An MNCS value of two for instance means that the publications of a university have been cited twice above world average.
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| PP(top 10%) (proportion of top 10% publications) | The proportion of the publications of a university that, compared with other publications in the same field and in the same year, belong to the top 10% most frequently cited.
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Collaboration indicators |
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| PP(collab) (proportion of interinstitutional collaborative publications) | The proportion of the publications of a university that have been co-authored with one or more other organizations. |
| PP(int collab) (proportion of international collaborative publications | The proportion of the publications of a university that have been co-authored by two or more countries. |
| PP(UI collab) (proportion of collaborative publications with industry) | The proportion of the publications of a university that have been co-authored with one or more industrial partners. |
| MGCD (mean geographical collaboration distance) | The average geographical collaboration distance (in km) of the publications of a university, where the geographical collaboration distance of a publication equals the largest geographical distance between two addresses mentioned in the publication’s address list. |
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Special types of journals |
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| The journal does not publish in English or it does publish in English but authors are concentrated in one or a few countries, indicating that the journal does not have a strong international scope. | |
| The journal has only a small number of references to other journals in the Web of Science database, indicating that in terms of citation traffic the journal is only weakly connected to these other journals. This is the case for many journals in the humanities, but also for trade journals and popular magazines. | |
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Size-dependent vs. size-independent indicators |
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| The Leiden Ranking by default reports size-independent indicators. These indicators provide average statistics per publication, such as a university’s average number of citations per publication. The advantage of size-independent indicators is that they enable comparisons between smaller and larger universities. As an alternative to size-independent indicators, the Leiden Ranking can also report size-dependent indicators, which provide overall statistics of the publications of a university. An example is the total (rather than the average) number of citations of the publications of a university. Size-dependent indicators are strongly influenced by the size of a university (i.e., a university’s total publication output) and therefore tend to be less useful for comparison purposes.
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Dr. habil György Fábri (1964) is an habilitated associate professor (Institute of research on Adult Education and Knowledge Management, Faculty of Education and Psychology of Eötvös Loránd University), head of the Social Communication Research Group. Areas of research: university philosophy, sociology of higher education and science, science communication, social communication, church sociology. His monograph was published on the transformation of Hungarian higher education during the change of regime (1992 Wien) and on university rankings (2017 Budapest). He has edited several scientific journals, and his university courses and publications cover communication theory, university philosophy, science communication, social representation, media and social philosophy, ethics, and church sociology.
Mr. Degli Esposti is Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Deputy Rector Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Dean of Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, Head of Service for the health and safety of people in the workplace, President of the Alma Mater Foundation and Delegate for Rankings.

Ben joined QS in 2002 and has led institutional performance insights function of QS since its emergence following the early success of the QS World University Rankings®. His team is, today, responsible for the operational management of all major QS research projects including the QS World University Rankings® and variants by region and subject. Comprising over 60 people in five international locations, the team also operate a widely adopted university rating system – QS Stars – and a range of commissioned business intelligence and strategic advisory services.Ben has travelled to over 50 countries and spoken on his research in almost 40. He has personally visited over 50 of the world’s top 100 universities amongst countless others and is a regular and sought after speaker on the conference circuit.Ben is married and has two sons; if he had any free time it would be spent reading, watching movies and skiing.
Anna Urbanovics is a PhD student at Doctoral School of Public Administration Sciences of the University of Public Service, and studies Sociology Master of Arts at the Corvinus University of Budapest. She is graduated in International Security Studies Master of Arts at the University of Public Service. She does research in Scientometrics and International Relations.


Dr. Mircea Dumitru is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest (since 2004). Rector of the University of Bucharest (since 2011). President of the European Society of Analytic Philosophy (2011 – 2014). Corresponding Fellow of the Romanian Academy (since 2014). Minister of Education and Scientific Research (July 2016 – January 2017). Visiting Professor at Beijing Normal University (2017 – 2022). President of the International Institute of Philosophy (2017 – 2020). President of Balkan Universities Association (2019 – 2020). He holds a PhD in Philosophy at Tulane University, New Orleans, USA (1998) with a topic in modal logic and philosophy of mathematics, and another PhD in Philosophy at the University of Bucharest (1998) with a topic in philosophy of language. Invited Professor at Tulsa University (USA), CUNY (USA), NYU (USA), Lyon 3, ENS Lyon, University of Helsinki, CUPL (Beijing, China), Pekin University (Beijing, China). Main area of research: philosophical logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. Main publications: Modality and Incompleteness (UMI, Ann Arbor, 1998); Modalitate si incompletitudine, (Paideia Publishing House, 2001, in Romanian; the book received the Mircea Florian Prize of the Romanian Academy); Logic and Philosophical Explorations (Humanitas, Bucharest, 2004, in Romanian); Words, Theories, and Things. Quine in Focus (ed.) (Pelican, 2009); Truth (ed.) (Bucharest University Publishing House, 2013); article on the Philosophy of Kit Fine, in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, the Third Edition, Robert Audi (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Metaphysics, Meaning, and Modality. Themes from Kit Fine (ed.) (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Since 1 February 2019 Minister Palkovics as Government Commissioner has been responsible for the coordination of the tasks prescribed in Act XXIV of 2016 on the promulgation of the Agreement between the Government of Hungary and the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the development, implementation and financing of the Hungarian section of the Budapest-Belgrade Railway Reconstruction Project.

He is the past President of the Health and Health Care Economics Section of the Hungarian Economics Association.

Based in Berlin, Zuzanna Gorenstein is Head of Project of the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK) service project “International University Rankings” since 2019. Her work at HRK encompasses the conceptual development and implementation of targeted advisory, networking, and communication measures for German universities’ ranking officers. Before joining the HRK, Zuzanna Gorenstein herself served as ranking officer of Freie Universität Berlin.
His books on mathematical modeling of chemical, biological, and other complex systems have been published by Princeton University Press, MIT Press, Springer Publishing house. His new book RANKING: The Unwritten Rules of the Social Game We All Play was published recently by the Oxford University Press, and is already under translation for several languages.

