| Field rankings for The National University of Singapore |
| Data provided by Thomson Reuters from its Essential Science Indicators, 1 January 2000-31 August 2010 |
| | Field | Papers | Cites | NUS cites per paper | World average | % +/– |
| 1 | Materials science | 2,361 | 32,200 | 13.64 | 6.79 | +101 |
| 2 | Agricultural sciences | 179 | 2,144 | 11.98 | 6.85 | +75 |
| 3 | Mathematics | 1,160 | 5,747 | 4.95 | 3.37 | +47 |
| 4 | Engineering | 4,987 | 30,876 | 6.19 | 4.60 | +35 |
| 5 | Pharmacology | 637 | 10,076 | 15.82 | 11.95 | +32 |
| 6 | Chemistry | 4,623 | 63,146 | 13.66 | 10.91 | +25 |
| 7 | Economics and business | 785 | 5,726 | 7.29 | 5.96 | +22 |
| 8 | Plant and animal sciences | 975 | 8,201 | 8.41 | 7.54 | +12 |
| 9 | Microbiology | 444 | 7,616 | 17.15 | 15.50 | +11 |
| 10 | Computer science | 1,779 | 6,882 | 3.87 | 3.60 | +8 |
| 11 | Environment and ecology | 436 | 5,158 | 11.83 | 11.02 | +7 |
| 12 | Biochemistry | 1,482 | 26,8 | 17.73 | 16.90 | +5 |
| 13 | Clinical medicine | 4,173 | 49,092 | 11.76 | 12.64 | -7 |
| %3D14 | Social sciences | 1,037 | 4,233 | 4.08 | 4.52 | -10 |
| %3D14 | Physics | 3,743 | 29,724 | 7.94 | 8.83 | -10 |
| 16 | Molecular biology | 1,008 | 19,617 | 19.46 | 25.21 | -23 |
| 17 | Neuroscience | 539 | 6,980 | 12.95 | 19.04 | -32 |
| | All fields | 31,065 | 320,301 | 10.31 | 10.57 | -2 |
The National University of Singapore (NUS) is the oldest and largest university in Singapore. It is also a regional and world leader in higher education and research.
The 2010-11 Times Higher Education World University Rankings put the institution at 34th in the world and fourth in Asia (behind the University of Hong Kong, the University of Tokyo and the Pohang University of Science and Technology).
Within Singapore itself, the NUS produced 52 per cent of the nation’s research output of some 60,000 journal articles over the past decade. The research performance of the NUS, therefore, is highly correlated with national research performance. There are 17 fields, listed above, in which the NUS ranked in the top 1 per cent of institutions worldwide by citations during the past decade. The fields in which the NUS fell short on this metric were geosciences, immunology, psychiatry and psychology, and space sciences. The 17 are ranked by relative citation impact, which here is represented as citations per paper for the NUS in a field compared with the world average in the same field.
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Materials science turned in the best performance for the NUS, with its papers cited at more than twice the world average. Other fields in the physical sciences with substantial output and high relative impact by NUS researchers were mathematics, engineering and chemistry. Of those fields that performed below the world average during 2000 to 2010, some significant improvements can be described based on the more recent 2005-09 period: papers in molecular biology and clinical medicine now score 9 per cent and 5 per cent above the world average, respectively; neuroscience papers are cited 12 per cent below the world average for 2005-09 compared with 32 per cent below for 2000-10; and physics scores 7 per cent below the average for the past five years compared with 10 per cent below the average for the past decade.
The nation as a whole has exhibited dramatic improvement in relative impact. While the average, as indicated, was 2 per cent below the world average during the past decade, in 2009 Singapore’s relative impact was 18 per cent above the yardstick, whereas in 2000 it scored 25 per cent below the figure.
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