CWTS Leiden Ranking of universities

It’s always a good idea to know where your university ranks

When it comes to selecting your university and course, it’s always wise to take university rankings into account. While QS and THE World University Rankings are quite popular, there is another one that many students look out for. Do you know about the CWTS (Dutch: Centrum voor Wetenschap en Technologische Studies) Leiden ranking system?

CWTS Leiden ranking

The CWTS Leiden Ranking is a global university ranking recorded on an annual basis exclusively on bibliometric indicators. These rankings get compiled by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands using the Clarivate Analytics bibliographic database i.e. Web of Science as its source of the publication and citation data.

With CWTS rankings, you can check:

• The top-ranked institutions in your study abroad destinations
• Ranking of your desired institution
• The best institution in your field

You can also check the ranking as per the indicator which is most important for you.

Leiden Ranking 2021

• The Leiden Ranking 2021 consists of 1225 universities from 69 different countries. These are all global universities that have produced at least 1,000 Web of Science indexed publications in the span of 2016–2019
• Indicators: The sophisticated set of bibliometric indicators include statistics at the university level on scientific impact, collaboration, open access publishing, and gender diversity
• Methodology: Every publication of a university belongs to one, or sometimes to more than one, of the main fields. If a publication is in more than one main field, then the publication is fractionally assigned to each of the main fields. For example, a publication that belongs to two main fields is assigned to each of the two fields with a weight of ½ = 0.5
• Besides, similar to previous editions, full counting or a fractional counting method is adopted in the ranking 2021. Full weight is given to each publication of the university, if the publication is authored by more than one person, then fractional counting is used. For instance, if a publication has been co-authored by five researchers and two of these researchers are affiliated with a particular university, the publication has a weight of 2/5 = 0.4 in the calculation of the scientific impact indicators for this university.
• Main fields: The CWTS Leiden Ranking 2021 includes statistics for various fields such as:
• a) Biomedical and health sciences
  b) Life and earth sciences
  c) Mathematics and computer science
  d) Physical sciences and engineering
  e) Social sciences and humanities
  

The next CWTS Ranking is expected to come out in the month of June 2022.

Top 20 universities by Leiden Rankings 2021

Source: https://www.leidenranking.com/ranking/2021/list

Updated on September 23, 2021