On March 9, 2017, the Essential Science Indicators (ESI) statistics over the past ten years ranked Tianjin University’s chemistry 42th with 7,095 papers and 117th with 17,864 citations among 1,204 institutions thus entering the top 1‰ of ESI institutional rankings in chemistry. Before that, on January 15, 2017, Tianjin University’s materials science was ranked 32th with 3,869 papers and 77th with 36,665 citations among 792 institutions entering the top 1‰ of ESI rankings in materials science, which means that TJU has entered the world’s 1000 top institutions in terms of materials science and chemistry after it accomplished the same in engineering in 2015.
At present, there are only nine universities in China which have three or more disciplinary fields in the top 1‰ of the ESI rankings. They are Peking University with six disciplinary areas entering the top 1‰, Zhejiang University with six, Tsinghua University with five, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Science and Technology of China with four, and Tianjin University, Fudan University, South China University of Technology and Sichuan University with three.
The ESI is based on more than 10,000 academic journals with over 10 million documented proceedings collected by the Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). It ranks the top scientists, institutions, countries, and journals in 22 fields of research based on journal article publication counts and citation data. A citation threshold is the minimum number of citations obtained by ranking papers in a research field in descending order by citation count and then selecting the top fraction or percentage of papers. The ESI Threshold reveals the number of citations received by the top 1% of authors and institutions and the top 50% of countries and journals in a 10-year period. Being in the top 1‰ also means that these institutions have internationally reached the top research level in specific fields.
TJU’s six disciplinary areas entering ESI ranking lists are: materials science, engineering, chemistry, physics, agricultural science, and biology and biochemistry, among which engineering, materials science and chemistry have successively entered the top 1‰.
By: Liao Xueying, Yang Linyan, Wang Kai
Editors: Sun Xiaofang and Ross Colquhoun
