The University of Utah is one of the country's heavy hitters in producing influential clinical medical research, according to a publication that evaluates the way scientists cite research.
The U. ranks 19th in the country for impact of research, among 50 universities publishing more than 1,000 research papers from 1990 through 1994, says Science Watch, a periodic report by the Institute for Scientific Information, in Philadelphia. The U. is just below Vanderbilt University and just above the City University of New York.Stanford and Harvard rank first and second on the list.
In terms of numbers of papers, the University of Utah was ranked 37th, with 1,933 papers in the four years. For comparison, the top producer in numbers of papers was Harvard, with 9,571.
"While they were 37th in output - that means the number of published papers - they were 19th in impact," Science Watch Editor Christopher King told the Deseret News. That "means that they got a pretty good impact score on a lesser quantity than some of the larger institutions."
Based on the weight given to individual clinical medicine papers put out by the University of Utah, "I think their research is telling," he said.
Science Watch tries to use the judgments of scientists themselves, by studying their citations of research articles, he said. "The rankings represent the collective judgment of scientists."
King said of the ranking at 19th in the country: "Obviously, that's very impressive."
For the period from 1986 through 1990, the U. was rated as 34th in impact.
In the early 1980s, King added, the average paper in this field written at the University of Utah was cited an average of 3.84 times during the year. Now, it has 5.66 citations. "That's a 47 percent jump," he said.
That improvement was rated 13th in the country. Harvard and Stanford, which are "perennial research heavyweights," according to the report, could not improve nearly as much because they were already at the top. The rankings of their change in impact went up 21 and 27 percent, respectively.
Richard Koehn, vice president for research at the University of Utah, responded to the ranking by saying it was wonderful news.
"Anytime you have an independent measure of the quality . . . and you rank this high nationally, this is very good news," he said.
The rankings help scientists review which institutions, individuals and fields of research are having significant impacts on science, he said. The listing of impact is especially valuable because some institutions may produce lots of papers that are never referenced by other scientists "because they don't necessarily report anything profound or significant."
The more significant a paper's findings, the more often it is cited by others, Koehn added.