Until recently, Harvard was the most productive research university in the world, according to a global ranking that looks at academic publication. That position may be teetering, the most recent evidence of a troubling trend for American academia. Harvard recently dropped to no. 3 on the ranking. The schools racing up the list are not Harvard’s American peers, but Chinese universities that have been steadily climbing in rankings that highlight the quality of research they produce.The reordering comes as the Trump administration has been slashing research funding to American schools that depend on t govt to pay for scientific endeavours. President Trump’s policies did not start the American universities’ relative decline, which began years ago, but they could accelerate it. “There is a big shift coming, a bit of a new world order in global dominance of higher education and research,” said Phil Baty, chief global affairs officer for Times Higher Education, an organisation that produces one of the better-known world rankings of universities.Educators and experts say the shift is a problem not just for American universities, but also for the nation as a whole. “There is a risk of the trend continuing, and potential decline,” Baty said. “I use the word ‘decline’ very carefully. It’s not as if US schools are getting demonstrably worse, it’s just the global competition: Other nations are progressing rapidly.”Back in the early 2000s, and a global university ranking based on scientific output, such as published articles, would be very different. Seven American schools would be among the top 10, led by Harvard University at no. 1. Only one Chinese school, Zhejiang University, would even make the top 25.Today, Zhejiang is ranked first on that list, the Leiden Rankings, from the centre for science and technology studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Seven other Chinese schools are in the top 10. Harvard produces significantly more research now than it did two decades ago, but it has nonetheless fallen to third. Harvard is still first in the Leiden rankings for highly-cited scientific publications.The issue at top American universities is not falling production. Six prominent American schools that would have been in the top 10 in the first decade of the 2000s – the University of Michigan, the University of California, Los Angeles, Johns Hopkins, the University of Washington-Seattle, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University – are producing more research than they did two decades ago, according to the Leiden tallies. But production by the Chinese schools has risen far more. According to Mark Neijssel, director of services for the centre for science and technology studies, the Leiden rankings take into account papers and citations contained in the Web of Science, a database set of academic publications which is owned by Clarivate, a data and analytics company. Thousands of academic journals are represented in the databases, many of which are highly specialised, he said.Rafael Reif, a former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said last year that “the number of papers and the quality of the papers coming from China are outstanding” and are “dwarfing what we’re doing in US”. China has been pouring billions of dollars into its universities and aggressively working to make them attractive to foreign researchers. President Xi Jinping has made the reasons for the country’s investments explicit, arguing that a nation’s global power depends on its scientific dominance. “The scientific revolution is intertwined with the game between superpowers,” he said in 2024. Go to Source
Leiden Rankings 2024: Chinese universities surpass Harvard; US faces funding-driven decline
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