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Geography Ranked Ninth Nationally

The Department of Geography in the College of Geosciences at Texas A&M University has been ranked ninth in Academic Analytics’ Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index.
By Tura King, Texas A&M Marketing & Communications November 27, 2007

TAMU geoscienceThe Department of Geography in the College of Geosciences at Texas A&M University has been ranked ninth, tied with Cornell, in Academic Analytics’ third annual Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index. The rankings were published this month in 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 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 doctoral 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 10 in geography were the University of California at Los Angeles at number one; UC Santa Barbara, second; UC Berkeley, third; Ohio State University, fourth; University of Colorado at Boulder, fifth; University of North Carolina at 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 gauge the productivity of a department’s faculty members.

Media contact: Tura King, Texas A&M Division of Marketing & Communications.

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