Birkbeck psychology research ranked 5th best in the world
College scores highly in Normalized Citation Impact – a core measure of research performance
Psychological research at Birkbeck has ranked fifth in the world in a category of the Best Global Universities Ranking 2016.
The College has scored highly in the ‘Normalized Citation Impact’ (NCI) index within the annual ranking’s ‘Psychiatry/Psychology’ category.
Comprising the total number of citations per research paper, NCI represents the overall impact of a university’s research and is independent of the institution’s size or age. Consequently, NCI is widely considered a core measure of research performance which is used by various evaluation bodies globally.
The College also scored 8th in the world in terms of its percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most highly cited papers.
Professor Mike Oaksford, Head of the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck, said: “It is an amazing achievement for a small University of London College to be ranked fifth in the world for such an important and influential index of research quality.
“The top five in Psychiatry/Psychology according to this index consisted of some of the most influential institutions in the world, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University and Stanford University. Together with our excellent fifth place in the recent REF2014, I’m immensely proud of the hard work and dedication of all our staff who contributed to these outstanding results.”
The department’s high position in the global rankings follows from its strong performance in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), in which Birkbeck’s Psychological Sciences were rated 5th in the UK, and its ‘Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience’ research achieved 100% at the highest ratings for impact.
Now in its second year, the Best Global Universities Ranking compares 750 institutions from 57 countries in terms of their academic research performance, plus global and regional reputations. The global rankings have been produced by Thomson Reuters' InCitesTM.
Find out more
- Best Global Universities Ranking 2016 – Birkbeck, University of London
- Department of Psychological Sciences
- School of Science
- Birkbeck’s performance in REF 2014