ASU has a strong track record of accomplishment in objective measures of research productivity in the molecular sciences. ASU ranked highly in a study published in Thompson Reuters' Science Watch, which measured the world-wide impact of publications in chemistry in terms of the number of citations that papers received. "All of each institution's papers (in the highly aggregated field designated "chemistry" by our Essential Science Indicators database) were considered," said Christopher King, editor of Science Watch. "For 2001 to 2011, we showed ASU with 1,305 such papers, cited a total of 41,517 times." With an average citation per paper (or impact factor) of 31.81, ASU is only outranked by Scripps Research Institute, Harvard, Rice, Caltech and Northwestern, and ranks ahead of MIT, the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford.
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According to the study, “In particular, citation analysis provides authority in reflecting the judgments that scientists themselves make in acknowledging the published research that they view as the most significant and useful.” It is noteworthy that these rankings include only papers in chemistry, and do not include the substantial body of work that ASU faculty and students choose to publish in journals of physics, materials science, and other technical disciplines.
These findings are consistent with other measures of impact based on publications in high impact journals. ASU is always in the top ten when research universities are ranked by the number of publications in chemistry and biochemistry in the high profile journals Science and Nature. For papers published in these two journals from 1998 to 2003, ASU ranked 7th, just behind MIT and Princeton. For the time period 2004 to 2009, ASU was now 6th, beaten only by Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, Stanford and Michigan. The latest ranking for 2009 - 2015 shows ASU in the #8 position, ahead of Princeton, Wisconsin, UC San Diego, Minnesota and Columbia.
These objective measures of visibility and productivity in molecular sciences reflect a research effort that places ASU firmly in the top rank of academic institutions.