[2022 CWTS Leiden Ranking] UNIST Ranked S. Korea’s No. 1 University for 6th Year Running!

UNIST has maintained its position as South Korea’s No. 1 university for the sixth successive year, according to this year’s CWTS Leiden Ranking that weighs how many of an institution’s scientific publications are widely cited by other scientists. The ranking puts UNIST in the top spot among S. Korean universities, and 121th place globally.

Published by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University in the Netherlands, the ranking focuses strictly on citation impact, rather than universities’ size or reputations.

Released on June 22, the 2022 edition of Leiden Ranking judged the top 1, 318 universities from 69 countries. These universities are the ones that have produced at least 800 Web of Science indexed publications in the period 2017–2020.

During this period of assessment, UNIST produced a total of 2,460 papers and about 13.6% (Approx. 335 papers) were among the top 10% most widely cited of all scientific publications. The ranking also reported that about 1.4% of UNIST’s publications between 2017 and 2020, belong to the top 1% of highly cited papers. This gives UNIST a reputation of being the No. 1 university in South Korea. Such results were based on fractional counting and it was higher than those of Sejong University (10.4%), KAIST (10.4%), POSTECH (10.3%), Yeungnam University (8.4%), Ewha Womans University (8.2%), Kangwon National University (7.9%), DGIST (7.7%), Dongguk University (7.7%), and the University of Ulsan (7.6%).

The top five highest-ranked universities overall (based on proportion of top 10% publications) are Rockefeller University (33.3%), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (23.7%), Princeton University (22.3%), Caltech (21.5%), Stanford University (21.2%), and Harvard University (20.7%), all USA.