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The rank of a university has been widely perceived as a reputation measure that is often determined based on the comprehensive overview of various factors. Among the factors, publication is imperative and carries a significant weight in almost every university ranking system around the globe. To reveal how publication may influence university ranking, we investigated the 2020 US News Best Global Universities Ranking results and analyzed different publication related criteria, including discipline coverage, publication productivity, research impact, level of interdisciplinary research, and degree of research collaboration. Shannon index and Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) index were calculated to compare universities at four levels (i.e. top50, top100, top200, and top500). Results showed that the top50 universities cover nearly all majority disciplines, at least half of which rank among the global top 10%. Top50 universities are also featured with high publication numbers, high-impact factors, and broad network for international collaboration. The top200 universities showed a relatively longer history of carrying out high level of interdisciplinary research compared to the universities belonged to the remaining category in which interdisciplinary research was mostly started less than a decade. More than two-thirds of surveyed universities with Shannon index above 2.5 and Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) above 1.5 shows that interdisciplinary research promotes the quality of publication. Universities small in size and focused on specific academic themes can earn top ranking spots based on their extraordinary academic performance, but the current ranking method results in more favor of the large comprehensive universities. In seeking for higher-ranking within the top200 category, in addition to expanding in campus size, increasing the number of academic programs, and encouraging more publications, university decision makers should value the efforts to develop leading academic disciplines, enable broad international collaborations, and promote new interdisciplinary programs.
Li et al. (Thu,) studied this question.