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Which is the best university for sports science?
24 Sep 2018
Denmark’s University of Copenhagen takes top spot for the first time in Shanghai Ranking’s Global Ranking of Sport Science Schools and Departments 2018, published last Friday.
The Norwegian School of Sport Sciences and Deakin University in Australia followed in second and third place respectively, in the third edition of the annual ranking. Last year, the top three schools were Deakin University, the UK’s Loughborough University and the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, in that order.
The Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports at the University of Copenhagen has units like Integrative Physiology and Molecular Physiology. Source: AFP
The league table by the Academic Ranking of World Universities, also known as Shanghai Ranking, compared sport-related institutions and units with similar peers. Only a sport university or sport-related unit(s) that have actively engaged in research in the past five years were selected. In total, 372 universities with their some 400 sport-related units were selected this year.
They are then ranked by several indicators of academic or research performance, including papers indexed in Web of Science (20 percent), total citations (20 percent), citations per paper (25 percent), papers published in top 25 percent journals (25 percent), and percentage of internationally collaborated papers (10 percent).
These are the top 10 universities in the rankings:
| 2018 Rank | Country | Unit Name |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Denmark | University of Copenhagen Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports Institute of Sports Medicine |
| 2 | Norway | Norwegian School of Sport Sciences Norwegian School of Sport Sciences |
| 3 | Australia | Deakin University School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences Department of Physical Activity and Health |
| 4 | UK | Loughborough University School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences |
| 5 | Australia | The University of Queensland School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences |
| 6 | Denmark | University of Southern Denmark Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics |
| 7 | Canada | The University of Calgary Faculty of Kinesiology Sciences |
| 8 | Italy | Verona University Faculty of Exercise and Sport Science Sport, Mountains, and Health Research Center |
| 9 | UK | Liverpool John Moores University School of Sport and Exercise Sciences |
| 10 | Belgium | Ghent University Department of Movement and Sport Science |
With the exception of Loughborough University and the University of Queensland, the top 10 schools on Shanghai Ranking’s do not feature in the QS world university rankings 2018: Sports sciences.
Four components were assessed for QS’s version: Academic reputation, Employer reputation, Research citations per paper and H-index (which measures both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar) – each holds a different weighting as research cultures and publication rates vary significantly across academic disciplines.
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