Thomson Reuters Completes Academic Reputation Survey with Record Response Rate

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Jun 17, 2010, 12:00 ET

PHILADELPHIA and LONDON, June 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Thomson Reuters has completed its Academic Reputation Survey, achieving a record 13,388 responses from professional scholars around the world.

The survey forms part of Thomson Reuters Global Institutional Profiles Project, an initiative that will create data-driven profiles of globally significant research institutions. It also will help inform the Times Higher Education's influential World University Rankings and represents the largest single reputation survey used in the rankings to date.

Launched in March, the survey is the largest of its kind ever undertaken by Thomson Reuters. Respondents were asked which institutions they considered the best in terms of research, teaching and by other factors such as geographical region. The assessments gathered through the survey will be combined with other key variables to form a comprehensive profile for each institution.

Key details from the reputational survey include:

Geographical spread: 38 percent of respondents were from the Americas, 30 percent from Asia Pacific and the Middle East and 28 percent from Europe.
Subject spread: 23 percent of respondents specialized in the fields of engineering and technology, 21 percent in physical sciences, 18 percent in social sciences and 18 percent in life sciences.
Academic background: 55 percent of respondents reported they spent the majority of their time on research and 31 percent said they spent most of their time on teaching.

"We are extremely pleased with the number of responses from the survey," said Jonathan Adams, director of research evaluation at Thomson Reuters. "We gave much consideration to the methodology used in the survey and this has paid great dividends in terms of the quality and comprehensiveness of the responses we received."

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

The Global Institutional Profiles Project will combine reputational feedback, scholarly outputs, research citation patterns, funding levels, and faculty characteristics 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.

Thomson Reuters

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SOURCE Thomson Reuters