Reuters ranks EPFL top in Europe

EPFL is ranked a hefty number one in European engineering schools in a recent online article in the Times of Higher Education (THE). While rankings should be taken with a grain of salt, this bibliometric indexing is generally considered more objective than others. Those universities having published more than 1,000 articles from 2000 to 2010 were ranked by Thomson Reuters according to how frequently papers published by researchers of the institution were cited by other authors – a good indication of how much influence research conducted at a university has had on the scientific community.

The article in THE makes it a point of saying that the two Swiss technical universities have scored well, “Noteworthy is the high ranking of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (EPFL and ETH), with European rankings of first and ninth, and world rankings of 14 and 40.” And EPFL’s place as number one in Europe and 14th in the world in this ranking should not really come as a surprise. Already in the CWTS-Leiden 2010 Ranking that works in a similar manner for citations but covers a wider range of scientific disciplines, EPFL is number one in Europe and number 15 in the world.

Without these kinds of ranking systems, it would be hard to classify universities – but do they really reflect the quality of research and teaching at EPFL? A definitive answer may not be possible. But EPFL’s top score for citations is a good indicator of the influence its research has had over the last decade in the engineering domain. It also certainly reflects a series of recent choices that have reinforced the institute’s quality of research and researchers – and it is this reputation, above all, that EPFL needs to sustain.