Preparing the Next Generation of Bridge Engineers
Civil engineering program ranked in the top five nationally and top 15 internationally for third consecutive year
Civil engineering associate professor Teng Wu stands with graduate students Shaopeng Li and Shivam Mishra.
By Peter Murphy
Published July 2, 2020
The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), or Shanghai Ranking places UB’s civil engineering program fourth in the U.S. and 12th internationally.
UB's civil engineering program remains consistent in ARWU rankings
This is the third straight year UB’s civil engineering program is ranked in the top five nationally. The civil engineering program has been ranked four years in a row and has never been below seventh nationally. This is also the third straight year the program ranks inside the top 15 internationally. Before breaking the top 15, the civil engineering program was ranked 16 worldwide.
This is the fourth year in a row that UB’s civil engineering program has been ranked by ARWU, one of the most influential global ranking systems, with criteria based largely on university research outcomes. In its 2020 ranking, UB’s civil engineering program received the highest score in the number of papers published in top academic journals (TOP) category, and also increased its ranking in the international collaboration (IC) category by approximately two points. Some of the other categories include: the number of papers authored by an institution, the ratio of papers published by an institution in an academic subject to the average citations of papers in the same category of the same year and same type, and the total number of faculty members winning awards in an academic subject.
To be eligible for the civil engineering ranking, universities need to have at least 100 research publications during the period covering 2014-2018.
“The Department has been consistent over the last several years according to ARWU,” says Joseph Atkinson, professor and chair of the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, “we’ve been solid on these rankings, and we expect to maintain this standing moving forward.”
The ARWU ranking was originally created to evaluate top Chinese universities, but the organization now ranks universities around the world. The Shanghai Ranking Consultancy began publishing the ranking in 2009.