Greatest World Universities Fit a Pattern

Top 10 Countries with
Greatest Scientific Impact
The H-Index
RealClearScience, May 29, 2013

Conventional wisdom holds that America is in decline, particularly in the arena of science and technology, and that countries like China are taking the lead. But as is often the case, the conventional wisdom is wrong.

According to R&D Magazine, in 2013, the U.S. will invest $424 B in research and development (R&D), while China will invest roughly half that amount ($220 B). Amazingly, the U.S. will invest more in R&D than all of Europe combined ($350 B).

Two years ago, the BBC reported that China may overtake the U.S. in scientific output by 2013, as measured by the total number of scientific journal articles published. That may or may not happen. Still, as correctly reported in Nature News, quantity does not trump quality. The article went on to say, rather harshly, that China's "scientific journals are filled with incremental work, read by virtually no one and riddled with plagiarism."

Therefore, a better -- though imperfect -- measure of scientific output is the h-index, a numerical value that reflects not only the quantity of articles published, but also the number of times they were cited by researchers…By this measure, China is not even in the global top 10. Instead, it ranks in at #17. The other BRICS do not even crack the top 20. (Russia #21, Brazil #22, India #23 and South Africa #35.)

So, which countries are in the top 10 for greatest scientific impact? Continue with the list to find out.

Source: SCImago Journal & Country Rank

#20. Norway
#19. South Korea
#18. Finland
#17. China
#16. Austria
#15. Israel
#14. Denmark
#13. Belgium
#12. Spain
#11. Australia
#10 Sweden
# 9 Switzerland
# 8 Netherlands
# 7 Italy
# 6 Japan
# 5 Canada
# 4 France
# 3 Germany
# 2 United Kingdom (with 18 of the world’s top 100 universities)
# 1 United States (with 31 of the world’s top 100 universities)

http://www.realclearscience.com/lists/top_10_countries_with_greatest_scientific_impact/

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and those 100 top universities are:

# 1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT] (USA)
# 2 University of Cambridge (UK)
# 3 Harvard University (USA)
# 4 University College London (UK)
# 5 University of Oxford (UK)
# 6 Imperial College London (UK)
# 7 Yale University (USA)
# 8 University of Chicago (USA)
# 9 Princeton (USA)
#10 California Institute of Technology (Caltech) (USA)
#11 Columbia University (USA)
#12 University of Pennsylvania (USA)
#13 ETH Zurich [Swiss Federal Institute of Technology] (Switzerland)
#14 Cornell Univeristy (USA)
#15 Stanford Univeristy (USA)
#16 Johns Hopkins University (USA)
#17 University of Michigan (USA)
#18 McGill University (Canada)
#19 University of Toronto (Canada)
#20 Duke University (USA)
#21 University of Edinburgh (UK)
#22 University of California, Berkeley (USA)
#23 University of Hong Kong (China)
#24 Australian National University (Australia)
#25 National University of Singapore (Singapore)
#26 King’s College London (UK)
#27 Northwestern University (USA)
#28 University of Bristol (UK)
#29 Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (Switzerland)
#30 The University of Tokyo (Japan)
#31 University of California, Los Angeles (USA)
#32 University of Manchester (UK)
#33 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (China)
#34 Ecole Normale Superiere de Paris (France)
#35 Kyoto University (Japan)
#36 University of Melbourne (Australia)
#37 Seoul National University (South Korea)
#38 University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA)
#39 University of Sydney (Australia)
#40 Chinese University of Hong Kong (China)
#41 Ecole Polytechnique (France)
#42 Brown University (USA)
#43 New York University (USA)
#44 Peking University (China)
#45 University of British Columbia (Canada)
#46 University of Queensland (Australia)
#47 Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
#48 Tsinghua University (China)
#49 Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
#50 Osaka University (Japan)
#51 University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
#52 University of New South Wales (Australia)
#53 Technische Uiversitat Munchen (Germany)
#54 University of Glasgow (UK)
#55 Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat Heidelberg (Germany)
#56 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA)
#57 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (USA)
#58 University of Warwick (UK)
#59 University of Washington (USA)
#60 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen (Germany)
#61 Monash University (Australia)
#62 University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
#63 KAIST – Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (South Korea)
#64 Boston University (USA)
#65 Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan)
#66 University of Sheffield (UK)
#67 Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)
#68 University of Texas at Austin (USA)
#69 London School of Economics and Political Science (UK)
#70 University of California, San Diego (USA)
#71 Lund University (Sweden)
#72 University of Nottingham (UK)
#73 University of Southampton (UK)
#74 University of Geneva (Switzerland)
#75 Leiden University (Netherlands)
#75 Tohuko University (Japan)
#77 University of Birmingham (UK)
#78 University of Helsinki (Finland)
#79 University of Western Australia (Australia)
#80 National Taiwan University (Taiwan)
#81 Uppsala University (Sweden)
#82 KU Leuven (Belgium)
#83 University of Auckland (New Zealand)
#84 Washington University in St. Louis (USA)
#85 Utrecht University (Netherlands)
#86 Nagoya University (Japan)
#87 Freie Universitat Berlin (Germany)
#88 Georgia Institute of Technology (USA)
#89 Aarhus University (Denmark)
#90 Fudan University (China)
#90 University of Zurich (Switzerland)
#92 Durham University (UK)
#93 University of St. Andrews (UK)
#94 University of Leeds (UK)
#95 City University of Hong Kong (China)
#95 Perdue University (USA)
#97 Pohang University of Science and Technology (South Korea)
#98 University of Pittsburgh (USA)
#99 Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands)
#100 University of California, Davis (USA)

http://www.usnews.com/education/worlds-best-universities-rankings/top-400-universities-in-the-world

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Postscript by the Blog Author

A flat out majority of the top 100 universities are found in the "Anglosphere" of the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, all of which are represented in the above list. I am not including the Hong Kong schools begun when that colony was part of the British Crown Colonies.

Another way of achieving a flat out majority of the top 100 universities is to include the "G7" nations of the USA, Canada, Japan, UK, France, Italy and Germany.