ACU's Social Sciences Research Joins World Elite

The Australian Catholic University (ACU) has a higher proportion of Web of Science high citation impact papers than any other Australian university in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, according to the recently released 2020 CWTS Leiden Ranking.

The influential Leiden Ranking is based on publications in the Web of Science database produced by Clarivate Analytics. It shows that of the research papers ACU publishes in the Social Sciences and Humanities (including research in the Business and Management domain), 15.0 per cent are in the world’s top 10 per cent based on number of citations by other researchers (not ‘discounting’ publications co-authored by ACU and other institutions). This puts ACU first in Australia, followed by the Universities of Sydney and Queensland (both, at 12.7 per cent).

Produced by the University of Leiden’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies, the Leiden Ranking allows smaller universities to compare their research efficiency with larger universities without being disadvantaged by their size, because it highlights the proportion of a university’s papers that are positioned in high impact, top-end journals, not just the overall number of research papers.

Globally, based on the above metrics, ACU is now also ranked in the top 100 institutions in the world. On par with institutions such as the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich in Germany, it currently outperforms such institutions as University of British Columbia (14.8%), Lancaster University (14.6%), University of Texas at Dallas (14.4%), Erasmus University Rotterdam (14.3%), Rutgers (14.2%), University of Manchester (13.8%), Michigan State (13.8%), Univ Catholique Louvain (13.2%), Tsinghua University (13.2%), Penn State (13.1%), and the National University of Singapore (13%).

Professor Thomas Lange, ACU’s Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Law and Business commented: “It is very pleasing to see that our strategic focus on top quality, high impact research publications is paying such dividends. I am naturally delighted that our growing number of publications in leading journals such as Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, The Leadership Quarterly, Human Resource Management (US), Human Relations, British Journal of Management, Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management and many others allowed us to make a powerful contribution to this globally recognized research ranking.”