The Department of Geography in the College of Geosciences has been ranked 9^th, tied with Cornell, in Academic Analytics’ third annual Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index. The rankings were released in the November 16^th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. According to the Chronicle’s Paula Wasley, this ranking of research university graduate programs “is based on what purports to be the first objective measurement of per-capita scholarly accomplishment.”

“We are very excited about this,” said Geography Department Head Dr. Douglas Sherman. “We’ve been building our faculty, research and graduate programs. It’s nice for these accomplishments to be recognized nationally.”

The 2007 index compiled overall institutional rankings on 375 universities that offer Ph.D. degrees. It examined a total of 164,843 faculty members, judging them on as many as five variables: books published; journal publications; citations of journal articles; federal-grant dollars awarded; and honors and awards.

“This ranking is especially important for us,” Sherman said, “because it is based on objective measures of faculty productivity, unlike some other rankings, such as those produced by the National Research Council, that include subjective, reputational factors.”

Other universities in the top ten in Geography were the University of California at Los Angeles at number one; UC Santa Barbara, second; UC Berkeley, third; The Ohio State University, fourth; University of Colorado at Boulder, fifth; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, sixth; San Diego State University, seventh; and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, eighth.

Academic Analytics is a for-profit company partly owned by the State University of New York at Stony Brook. According to the company’s founder, Lawrence B. Martin who is dean of the graduate school at Stony Brook, the rankings are a way to gage the productivity of a department’s faculty members.