Ranking SCImago: Position of Portuguese Universities

The SIR 2009 World Report ranks 2000 worldwide Research Institutions and Organizations and analyzes its research performance in the period 2003-2007 over indicators of output (number of publications), internationalization (publications in international collaboration) and scientific impact (cites per document and normalized citation).

The report, showing a first version of the results of the SCImago Institutions Rankings research project, is built with data from Elsevier database Scopus (over 16 millions of publications and 150 millions of citations) and includes research institutions from 84 countries from the five continents, grouped into five research sectors: Government, Higher Education, Health, Corporate and Others.

The relative position of the Portuguese universities depends upon the indicator. When the impact (measured by the average number of citations per publication, cites per document) is considered, NOVA is ranked first (5.89 cites per document) followed by Universidade de Lisboa (5.8) and Universidade do Porto (5.69).

It should be stressed that the most prestigious European and North-American Universities, such as Cambridge or Harvard, obtain the highest values in this impact indicator, 11.63 and 16.37 cites per document, although in the output indicator (number of publications) their position is below other universities of bigger dimension.

Finally, if the normalized citation is considered (taking into account the citation habits of the different scientific areas), NOVA is the 3rd Portuguese university (1.14), after Universidade do Porto and Técnica de Lisboa, which are classified ex-aequo in this parameter (1.17). The Universities of Cambridge and Harvard obtain normalized citation values of 1.88 and 2.38, respectively.