w00t

[spoonless]

The new numbers are out, and our physics department is (still) ranked as the top university in the US in terms of impact factor:

UCSC ranks first in nation for research impact in physics

"In a new analysis of research publications from top U.S. universities, the University of California, Santa Cruz, ranked first for the impact of its faculty in the field of physics and fifth in the field of space sciences."

I saw this statistic when I first heard about UCSC in 2002, and it made me wonder why I'd never heard much about it. After checking the websites of the professors to read about the research they were doing, it was enough to convince me to apply. The other big reason I applied was that at the time we were also ranked #1 in terms of "graduate student satisfation". That was based on 2001 numbers so I don't know if it's still true (and from reading this article I gather it's probably not or he would have mentioned it) but I can attest that it's a hella fun environment to work in, and I've been extremely satisfied. I must say, though, that it's still surprising to me to see that we have such a high impact factor, considering there are a lot of schools I could name who I think of as "better" in terms of research, depending on what specific area of physics you're talking about. And whenever I visit Stanford, I notice that the grad students there seem a lot smarter (or maybe they just appear that way because they dress all preppy and stuff :)... j/k). But maybe the issue is just that we're comparatively small. We do a few things really well, like particle physics, astrophysics, and condensed matter physics, and don't have a huge amount of professors, but their publications get read a lot. At any rate, it's nice to see we're holding strong at #1. GO SLUGS!

Update [2/16/07]: Here are the actual rankings and citation numbers from ScienceWatch. As suspected (see comments), being small had a lot to do with us getting the number one slot, as we had the fewest number of total papers published out of those in the top ten.

Comments

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Yeah... that sounds right. Although I'm still scratching my head about a few things, like how we could rank so much lower for faculty prestige and yet be so high on impact factor... the two seem like they should be correlated more, since for the most part (I would assume) the success of faculty is judged by their impact factor. Maybe it's that the past impact of our professors was not that great, but currently it's awesome? Or maybe some of the top schools hire professors that were great in the past, but no longer do much central work and instead just sit and think about more speculative, tangential ideas? I can't quite figure it out.

[killtacular.livejournal.com]

I guess if you view faculty prestige as more of an aggregate of all faculty members, and UCSC was pretty small, then you could have a high impact factor (since that is measured per-paper-published) without having a necessarily high faculty prestige (which might be more analogous to most citations in general).

I mean, the way it appears to be measured, if you took the exact same faculty you guys have now, and hired 5 more profs with slightly lower average-citations-per-paper, then your "impact factor" would actually go down. However, it could certainly be the case that your department would be considered "more prestigious" or "better in general" if it was your current faculty plus five more pretty good profs, right? Maybe something like that helps explain what is going on.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, smallness might actually be the biggest factor here. Or it could be a combination.