Top institutions in Mathematics

The 50 universities and research institutes listed above were among the world's most influential in the field of mathematics - whether by total citations received or by citations per paper - for papers published during the period 1 January 2001 to 28 February 2011. This table ranks the institutions by citation impact, or citations per paper. The number of highly cited papers in the field for each institution is also listed, as well as the percentage of highly cited papers in terms of total output for each. Highly cited papers are defined as papers that rank in the top 1 per cent by citations for their field and year of publication.

In the current edition of Essential Science Indicators, 200 institutions are listed in the field of mathematics, which is defined by a set of journals devoted to pure mathematics, applied mathematics, statistics and probability. Since Essential Science Indicators presents only the top 1 per cent of institutions in a field in terms of total citations earned, this means some 20,000 institutions were surveyed to obtain these results. Of the 200 institutions, 78 received 3,000 or more citations during the period, so all those listed above rank in the top one-half of 1 per cent by citations. The average citation impact in mathematics during the 10-year and two-month period surveyed here was 3.26.

Among the institutions listed in the table, the top three by number of papers published are the University of Wisconsin (1,632), the University of California, Berkeley (1,620) and the University of Michigan (1,551). The three with the highest number of citations are the University of California, Berkeley (14,070), Stanford University (12,548) and the University of Minnesota (11,375). The top three institutions in terms of their percentage of highly cited papers published are Stanford University (7.63 per cent), Duke University (6.3 per cent) and the University of California, Los Angeles (5.8 per cent). By definition, one would expect only 1 per cent of an institution's papers to be highly cited, so these three exceeded expectations by roughly six to eight times.

Finally, as the table shows, top honours in citation impact go to Johns Hopkins University, despite its relatively small output.

The nations represented by the institutions in the group of 50 are: the US (35 institutions), the UK (four), France (three), and Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Israel, Singapore and Switzerland (one each).

Mark Newman of the University of Michigan fielded the most-cited paper in mathematics during the period: M.E.J. Newman, "The structure and function of complex networks", SIAM Review, 45 (2): 167-256, June 2003. This paper, in an area of growing interest, has received 3,064 citations to date. That is 557 times more than the average number of citations for a mathematics paper published in 2003, which is 5.50. On this subject, see M.E.J. Newman's Networks: An Introduction (2010).

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