The indicators employed in the field-based ranking and their respective weightings in the composite measures are identical to those used in the overall performance ranking. Table 2 shows the criteria, indicators, and their respective weightings used by field-based ranking.

Table 2: The Criteria, Indicators, and Their Respective Weightings Used by Field-based Ranking

Research Productivity:

The number of articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals is an appropriate indicator of the productivity of a research institution. To fairly represent a university’s on-going and current research productivity, this project employs two indicators: the number of articles in the last eleven years (1997-2007), and the number of articles in the current year (2007).

“Number of articles in the last 11 years” draws data from ESI, which include 1997-2007 statistics of articles published in journals indexed by SCI and SSCI. “Number of articles in the current year” relies on the 2007 data obtained from SCI and SSCI, which were searched between Jan 19 and Jan 31, 2008.

Research Impact:

The number of citations on a particular academic article within a specific time frame is a commonly accepted indicator for that article’s impact. This project considers both the long-term and short-term impacts of a particular research and seeks to provide a fair representation of a university’s research impact regardless of its size and faculty number.  Thus, this project measures research impact for each of the six fields by: the number of citations in the last eleven years, the number of citations in the last two years, and the average number of citations in the last eleven years.

‘Number of citations in the last 11 years” draws 1997-2007 citation statistics in each field from ESI. “Number of citations in the last 2 years” draws 2006-2007 citation statistics in each field from SCI and SSCI at WOS, which include citation statistics updated to the dates of retrieval. “Average number of citations in the last 11 years” is the number of articles in the last eleven years divided by the number of citations in the last eleven years.

Research Excellence:

 
This project assesses each university’s research excellence in each of the six fields by the following indicators: the h-index of the last two years, the number of Highly Cited Papers from ESI, and the number of articles in high-impact journals in the current year (hi-impact journal articles). “H-index of the last 2 years” measures both the quantity and quality of a university’s research in each field via the use of the 2006-2007 data from SCI and SSCI. It is defined as “a university has index h if h of its Np papers in the last two years have at least h citations each and the other (Np – h) papers have ≦h citations each.”
 

“Number of Highly Cited Papers” utilizes data from ESI, which include statistics of “Highly Cited Papers” from 1997 to 2007. ESI defines Highly Cited Papers as SCI /SSCI-indexed papers that are cited most (in the top 1% of the total papers for each of the six fields indexed in the same year) within the last ten years.
 

“Number of articles in high-impact journals in the current year” employs data from JCR, which supply the impact factor of each journal in its subject field. This project defines high-impact journals as journals whose impact factors ranked as the top 5% of the total journals within a specific field. With high-impact journals lists derived from JCR, this project is able to count the numbers of each university’s articles published in high-impact journals by each field.