POSTECH was ranked at the top of Thomson Reuters’s list of the top 25 Asia-Pacific institutions in chemistry. According to the data, POSTECH has had 18.44 citations per paper in the last ten years from Jan. 2000 to Apr. 2010. POSTECH was ranked first in Asia and 55th in the world.

The database consisted of original research reports and review articles indexed by Thomson Reuters. For papers with multiple institutions, each institution received full credit.

The survey was meaningful in that it measured the actual impact that the school has imposed on the field. The measure of citations per paper surmounts the limit that the mere count or summation of papers published has. The simple count has another problem in that bigger institutes and smaller institutes would not have a fair comparison, since bigger institutes are more likely to produce more papers with a greater number of researchers.

The top five institutes after POSTECH were the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University of Science Technology, Japan Science and Technology Agency and the University of Tokyo. Among the Korean institutes, KAIST was ranked 17th and Seoul National University was ranked 24th in Asia.

Taihyun Chang, Professor and the Department Head of Chemistry, said, “Chemistry is a fiercely competitive field on the basis of cutting edge technologies. POSTECH will further promote the professors research activities and attract outstanding researchers to become a world-class institute.”