High-quality research reaps Leiden rewards

ACU has performed exceptionally well in the 2021 CWTS Leiden Ranking, publishing a greater proportion of high-quality research papers than any other Australian university in two fields: social sciences and the humanities, and biomedical and health sciences.

The Leiden Ranking showed that ACU’s research performance in 2021 placed us 65th in the world – behind UTS, ranked 58th – for proportion of publications in the top 10 per cent cited by other researchers, but first in Australia for proportion of 5 per cent most cited.

It’s an exceptional result in ACU’s second year of ranking and improves on our 2020 performance, where we ranked behind UTS on both measures of research quality. It also marks our rise into the world’s top 100 and top 50 of universities for 10 per cent and 5 per cent most cited outputs respectively.

The university also produced a higher percentage of outputs in the top percentile of the field than most Catholic universities globally.

ACU’s global ranking in social sciences and humanities rose almost 100 places in 2021 when measured by proportion of outputs in top 1 per cent cited in the field. Ranked 8th in Australia and just inside the top 200 in 2020, ACU is now the top-ranked Australian university and the only one in the top 100 for this research indicator.

“This is a significant achievement and indication of our strength in an area of specialisation fundamental to our identity as a Catholic institution,” said Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Wayne McKenna.

In biomedical and health sciences, ACU was again the highest ranked Australian university by proportion of papers cited among the top 5 per cent and 10 per cent, improving our global ranking from 2020 to place among the top 50 worldwide for both indicators.

Produced by Leiden University’s Center for Science and Technology, Leiden ranks institutions using bibliometric data across four categories: research quality, research collaboration with other institutions, the degree to which their research findings are open access, and gender equity among their researchers.

In the area of research quality, it allows smaller universities like ACU to compare their research output with larger universities by highlighting the proportion of a university’s papers that have been most often cited, not just the overall volume of research papers.

ACU’s performance in this year’s Leiden ranking follows our success in the most recent ARWU subject rankings, where we are now placed among the top 50 universities in the world for education, nursing, and sport science.