According to the evaluation from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University in the Netherlands, on the basis of the global database company Thomson Reuters, the research results of POSTECH ranked among the best in the world. For the rankings of 2013, the CWTS at Leiden University has looked into a total of 500 universities for the field of science and has made a variety of rankings for different aspects. For example, some aspects were the number of thesis papers, produced their influence, and frequency of citations. The rankings were largely divided into two groups according to the indicators of “impact,” and “collaboration.” POSTECH has done well in the impact categories.
The frequency of citations from POSTECH thesis papers ranked 95th in the world and 8th in Asia. This evaluation looks into the proportion of the publications of a university belonging to the top 10% of their field. Among the most frequently used 10% thesis papers, 13.10% was cited from POSTECH’s. This signifies that out of 10 research papers, 1.3 papers are recognized as top class. Most notably, in the field of Life & Earth Sciences, POSTECH ranked 46th in the world. The Natural Sciences & Engineering field, which includes fields such as Physics and Chemistry, ranked 85th. POSTECH is the only Korean university that ranked within the top 100 in this section of the evaluation.
Compared to other universities, such as MIT, University of California-Santa Barbara, and Stanford, which were leading universities in most areas in this evaluation, POSTECH received a somewhat low rank (309th, 2,710 papers) for the number of thesis papers produced. From its limited population, this was an inevitable result. However, in the evaluation that valued the mean citation score, which calculates the average number of citations of the publications of a university, normalized for field differences and publication year, POSTECH ranked 105th in the world with the score of 1.19.