Pulling rank

If it seems like every day someone is coming up with a new system for ranking colleges and universities, it's probably because every day someone is coming up with a new system for ranking colleges and universities. The latest is called the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, and it was developed by a company called Academic Analytics. As the name implies, the system ranks universities based on the scholarly output of faculty members, including books and journal articles published as well as journal citations and awards. The Chronicle of Higher Education explains the methodology and tackles the mini-controversy it has engendered here. (Subscription required.)

In case you are wondering, Carnegie Mellon fared pretty well in this index, coming out number six overall among large research universities. We were ranked number one in cognitive science and in the top 10 in civil and environmental engineering; computer engineering; linguistics; applied mathematics; computer science; information science; and statistics. You can see how we stack in other rankings by clicking here, including the granddaddy of them all, the U.S. News and World Report rankings.

Jonathan Potts