Vanderbilt University placed No. 7 in rankings released for the scholarly production of professors at research universities in the United States.
The Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index was released on Jan. 8 by Academic Analytics, based in Chester, Pa., using data from 2005. Vanderbilt competed in the large research university category.
Vanderbilt doctoral programs in pharmacology, educational leadership, special education, Portuguese and Spanish were ranked No. 1. Other programs ranked include developmental biology at No. 7, genetics at No. 3, microbiology at No. 9, neuroscience at No. 2, physiology at No. 3, teacher education and professional development at No. 6, French at No. 3, German at No. 8 and educational psychology at No. 3.
Camilla Benbow, dean of Peabody College of Education and Human Development, said the rankings “affirm the college‘s high reputation in several disciplines. Our faculty in each of these areas is outstanding, and the data backs it up.”
Carlos Jauregui, assistant professor of Spanish and anthropology, said faculty and administrators in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese were “delighted with this news and look forward to continue working for the advancement of the academic excellence for which this university is known.”
“We have been working together in our department very hard for the last four years to make our graduate programs in Spanish and Portuguese the best of the best,” Jauregui said. “In 2005-2006 our faculty published several books and received major recognitions and awards that helped us to be ranked No. 1 in the country and be recognized as an extraordinarily dynamic program.”
The Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, developed by Lawrence Martin, dean of the graduate school and professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University, measures the scholarly productivity of faculty based on publications, citations and financial and honorary awards.
“At research universities, more than 50 percent of a faculty member‘s salary is compensation for scholarly work,” said Martin, also chief scientific consultant at Academic Analytics. “One of the greatest challenges for academia has been finding a way to measure and evaluate that scholarly – as distinct from teaching – productivity. The FSP Index allows university leadership for the first time to get a clear picture of the comparative scholarly strength and vitality of their doctoral programs relative to others on an annual basis.”
The 2005 Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index now includes information from nearly 200,000 faculty members at 354 institutions, a significant expansion from the 2004 version. That could partly account for jumps in the list like Vanderbilt‘s move from No. 54 to No. 7, said Academic Analytics spokeswoman Stefanie Altman.
Academic Analytics ranked Harvard University as the top large research university in its index for 2005, followed by a tie for No. 2 between California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Francisco. Massachusetts Institute of Technology finished No. 3, followed by Yale University; Carnegie Mellon University; Washington University in St. Louis; Vanderbilt; John Hopkins University; and Duke University.
More information on Academic Analytics is available at http://www.academicanalytics.com/. For more news from Vanderbilt University, go to VUCast, the website of Vanderbilt News Service, at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/news/.
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu