Excellence, Innovation, Leadership: Research at the University of Toronto
May 1, 2012
The University of Toronto’s strength in research and scholarship is recognized and celebrated across Canada and around the world. The numbers speak for themselves:
- University of Toronto faculty, staff, and students lead Canada in aggregate publication numbers and citation counts as measured by Thomson Reuters. Remarkably, as this analysis is broken down by discipline, the University of Toronto community continues to lead Canada in every major category: Engineering and Technology, Life Sciences, Health Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, and Physical Sciences.
- Researchers at U of T consistently win a larger share of the most prestigious national and international awards than those at any other university in Canada. Moreover, U of T’s share of these awards is clearly disproportionate to its share of the national faculty pool.
- Researchers and scholars at the University have received the largest share of funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
- When one looks at rankings that focus on research strength and impact, the University of Toronto leads all Canadian institutions and is among only a handful of elite schools from around the world. Two quick examples: According to the Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities published by the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT), the University of Toronto ranks ninth in the world; The Scimago Institutions Rankings puts the University of Toronto third globally among higher education institutions for research impact.
These are extraordinary results. I salute the faculty, staff, and students in our community whose creativity – and hard work – make the University of Toronto the remarkable place it is.
The latest report from the Vice-President, Research, Professor Paul Young, tells some of the stories behind the metrics. The report is called Life in 2027 – Excellence, Innovation, Leadership: Research at the University of Toronto.
The report’s subtitle is “Ideas about tomorrow from our next generation”. Accordingly, it profiles a sample of our young faculty and emerging research stars. I particularly like the spread across pages 12 and 13 highlighting just a few of the students making an enormous contribution to research and scholarship at the University of Toronto.
The report includes “U of T research by the numbers”, a small pamphlet at the back featuring the kinds of metrics with which I began. But the real strength of the report, I believe, is that it tells some of the narrative behind the numbers. And the amazing thing about the University of Toronto, of course, is that there are literally thousands of similar stories.