The Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan last week released the results of its "1009 Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities," in which NTU ranked 102nd in the world in terms of "by field" and "non by field" comparisons. Additionally, when the number of faculty members was taken into consideration, National Taiwan University's ranking moved up to the 67th place.

Based on "by field" comparisons, NTU ranked 32nd and 66th in the area of engineering and sciences respectively. In the areas of agriculture, clinical medicine, life sciences and social sciences, NTU was ranked among the top 300. NTU's performance in the area of social sciences was ranked 217th in the world, and this year marks the first time that NTU's performance in social sciences breaks into the top 300.

In order to understand the academic competitiveness of Taiwan's research type universities, the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan inaugurated the "Performance Ranking System of Scientific Papers of World Universities" in 2007, which used three major indicators, i.e., "research productivity ", "research impact," and "research excellence" to evaluate the performance of scientific papers of the various universities and listed the top 500 universities in the world. From 2008 onwards, the Council took one step further to provide "by field" rankings, and listed the top 300 universities in the world in the areas of agriculture, engineering, life sciences, general sciences and social sciences.

A spokesman for the Council points out that, the 2009 performance ranking of scientific papers of world universities has many special features, among which is the extraordinary importance attached to the academic quality of the papers published. In addition to the by-field comparisons, academic quality indicators constituted 80% of the total score, whereas volume indicators only accounted for 20% of the total score. At the same time, short term indicators made up 55% as opposed to long term indicators, allowing a university's current progress to be reflected in the yearly rankings. The criteria for evaluation are divided into 8 categories, which are: total number of papers published in the last 11 years, total number of papers published in the current year, frequency of papers cited within the last 11 years, frequency of papers cited within the last 2 years, average number of papers cited within the last 11 years, the h-index of the last two years, the number of highly cited papers and the number of high impact papers. (see the chart below: 2009 weightings of long term and short term indicators)

Besides, as the number of faculty often influences the volume of a university's academic output, the Council makes compensation for the injustice arising from the scale of universities by attaching 40% weight to the following four indicators (number of papers published within the last 11 years, number of papers published in the current year, the frequency of papers cited within the last 11 years, and the frequency of papers cited within the last two years). The Council then uses standardization procedures to process the acquired data, and provides the results as reference values in the "non by field" rankings (see the rankings of university scales provided as references)