Stanford, MIT, and Harvard have consistently ranked at the pinnacle of Clarivate's list of the world's most innovative universities for nearly two decades. Leveraging the citations found in publications associated with these prestigious institutions could serve as a cost-effective proxy for gauging innovation in research assessments. Surprisingly, it has always puzzled me why both the Web of Science and Scopus databases have yet to establish an index specifically for high-quality citations related to publications acknowledged by scientists in leading universities. This oversight is particularly noteworthy because not all citations hold equal weight; a citation from a Ph.D. student in a university in a less affluent country carries a different significance than one from a Professor at Stanford, MIT, or Harvard.
Evaluating innovation through citations from Stanford, MIT, and Harvard becomes particularly crucial for universities in economically disadvantaged countries that lack the financial resources to conduct traditional research assessments involving substantial expenditures on top experts from affluent nations. It is worth noting that even prosperous countries express concerns about the exorbitant costs associated with conventional research assessments. For instance, the United Kingdom spent a staggering $350 million on its 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Extrapolating this cost to countries like China and India, adopting a similar research assessment model could incur a total expense exceeding $1 billion. Such exorbitant sums could be far more effectively allocated to hiring scientists and funding critical research initiatives.
PS
- The sole index that approaches the aforementioned citation 'elite' is the K-index, introduced in 2018 and published in the Elsevier journal Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437117308075
