Monday, March 2, 2009

Carleton School of Computer Science in Canada's Top Five

Imagine my excitement when I stumbled across this article on ScienceWatch: Canadian Universities: Highest Impact in Computer Science, 2003-07. Way to go, Carleton School of Computer Science! (That's where I study, for anyone who doesn't know.)
Ranked by average citations per paper, among Canadian universities that published at least 50 papers in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals of computer science & engineering between 2003 and 2007.

Rank Institution Papers
2003-07
Citations
per paper
1 University of British Columbia 137 2.89
2 University of Toronto 158 2.82
3 University of Western Ontario 87 2.17
4 McGill University 86 2.13
5 Carleton University 116 1.72

4 comments:

Christian Muise said...

Woot for U of T.

You'd probably have us beat if you normalized based on student population though...

Gail Carmichael said...

Yup, thought of you and Elan when I saw who beat us. I was surprised by Western - they have a good CS program?? Good point about student population (and faculty, since we're smaller there, too).

Onyx Tarragon said...

:-) Yes, we have a good CS program at Western. I'm a prof there. :-)
However, what's interesting, and what might skew the rankings, is that the ScienceWatch ranking counts only journal papers. CS is weird in a number of ways: one is that our highest-quality journals tend to come from the professional societies (especially the ACM and IEEE), and another is that many conferences are considered higher-quality than many journals.
Having a lot of journal citations may just mean that there are people there that tend to publish in journals indexed by ScienceWatch (which is itself published by a science publisher). At UWO, we have a strong research group in formal language theory, another in computer vision, and another in computer algebra. My impression is that those fields do tend to publish more in journals than the average for CS.
However, that doesn't take away from the fact that UWO's CS program is indeed excellent. :-)

Gail Carmichael said...

Hey Jamie! It's too bad that we don't hear much about Western and their CS program - I suppose schools like yours and mine often get ignored in the shadow of Waterloo and U of T. But this sort of article can showcase us, even if it is skewed (the conference point was an especially good one).

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