Thomson Reuters Academic Reputation Survey Shows High Level of Engagement From Global Scholarly Community

Nearly one third of responses came from Asia

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May 10, 2010, 12:01 ET

PHILADELPHIA and LONDON, May 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Thomson Reuters, the authority on research analytics and decision support citation data for more than half a century, today announced preliminary results of its Academic Reputation Survey. The survey not only received responses from professional scholars from every corner of the world, but also an excellent breadth of results across different subject areas.

Thousands of responses were received in six subject areas: engineering and technology; physical sciences; life sciences; clinical, preclinical and health; social sciences; and arts and humanities. Nearly one third of these responses came from Asia, including a strong representation from China and Japan.

"We're particularly pleased with the number of responses from the Asia Pacific region," said Jonathan Adams, director of research evaluation at Thomson Reuters. "As other surveys have been criticized for over-representing North America and Europe, we took particular care to better balance regional representation."

To help control for language and translation bias the Academic Reputation Survey was offered in eight languages: Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese and English.

"Interestingly, country affiliation did not always predict language usage," Adams added. "For example, many United States-based participants took the survey in Chinese -- illustrating a highly mobile global academic community."

The Academic Reputation Survey is part of the Thomson Reuters Global Institutional Profiles Project. The initiative will create data-driven profiles of globally significant research institutions -- combining reputational feedback, scholarly outputs, citation patterns, funding levels, and faculty characteristics across disciplines in one comprehensive database. The dataset can be packaged and analyzed to different specifications, giving organizations custom information for evaluating and benchmarking their performance and supporting efforts to secure research funding. The data gathered for the Global Institutional Profiles Project will also help inform the Times Higher Education's influential World University Rankings.

Thomson Reuters will continue to analyze and release detailed results of the Academic Reputation Survey in the coming months. For more information and resources, please visit http://science.thomsonreuters.com/globalprofilesproject.

Thomson Reuters

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SOURCE Thomson Reuters