Research productivity, university revenue, and scholarly impact (citations) of 169 British, Canadian and United States universities (1977)

Abstract

One hundred and sixty-nine universities, comprising three separate samples from Britain, Canada, and the United States were evaluated in terms of their productivity across all disciplines. The 1977Arts and Humanities, Social Science, andScience Citation Indices were used as the basis for counting the total number of publications from each of the universities. The 10 overall most productive universities were Harvard University; the University of Texas; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of London, England; the University of Wisconsin; the University of Illinois; the University of Minnesota; the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; and the University of Washington, Seattle. Fifteen of the most productive 100 universities were from the United Kingdom while eleven were from Canada. Additional data were collected including: the revenue of the university, the year the university was founded, the number of subscriptions to current periodicals, the number of bound volumes in the library, the aptitude scores and number of both graduate and undergraduate students, the total number of faculty members, and the number of publications of, reputational rating, and citations to, the faculty members in the psychology departments. A powerful general factor was found to permeate the more than 30 disparate measures, i.e., those universities that were high on one measure were high on others. This general factor could be labelled a dimension of wealth, quality, or size.