Study ranks Rice Social Sciences No. 1

Rice’s School of Social Sciences is ranked No. 1 in a new study based on faculty citations in the news media and federal research funding.

The Faculty Media Impact Project ranked social sciences departments at 94 universities by searching the Google News archive for how often more than 12,700 faculty members appeared in 6,000 news sources between 2006 and 2011.

After the citations for each professor were totaled and averaged per faculty member, the researchers divided the total average citation score of faculty members within a department by the percentage of that department’s public research funding.

Rice’s total citation score was 6.40, and its total ranking score was 58.18. No. 2-ranked Southern Methodist University had a total citation score of 4.44 and a total ranking score of 44.40.

Within Rice’s School of Social Sciences, the Department of Economics ranked highest.

The project, run by the Center for a Public Anthropology at Hawaii Pacific University, was intended to assess the degree to which faculty share their research with the broader public to explain the value of their publicly funded studies.

For more on the study, visit http://facultyimpact.publicanthropology.org/.