St. Francis Xavier University’s contribution to research excellence has once again been recognized nationally.
StFX is among Canada’s Top 50 Research Universities, according to Research Infosource Inc., a leading research, consulting, and publishing firm that specializes in the areas of policy, research, business intelligence and analysis on science, technology, innovation, and the Canadian R&D ecosystem, which released its annual report on university research performance on Jan. 25, 2022.
Of particular note in the overall scorecard of university research performance, StFX ranked sixth overall in the country in the category of publication impact – a measure of the quality and impact of research published by StFX faculty members. The full table can be found at the following link: https://researchinfosource.com/pdf/2021RUYAllUniversities.pdf
“It is impressive that StFX rates so well in this area nationally. No other small, undergraduate focused universities are ranked within the Top 10 for publication impact and there is only one other small university within the Top 20,” says Dr. Richard Isnor, StFX Associate Vice President, Research and Graduate Studies.
This is the second year in a row that StFX has been ranked a top performer nationally in research publication impact – one year ago StFX ranked even better (fifth in the country) in this category. The top universities in this, and the other categories measured by Research Infosource, tend to be dominated by the large, research-intensive universities that are members of the U15.
Dr. Isnor notes, “Although the system used for this metric by Research Infosource is not comprehensive in terms of disciplinary coverage, it does compare universities using a common data set and across a common set of core disciplines. Data is provided by the Observatoire des sciences et des technologies, which is Canada’s authoritative system for analysis of science and technology.” He adds, “frequently attention is directed ranking of universities according to research funding levels, but there are other measures of research quality that are of equal importance, particularly for smaller universities like StFX.”
Other university ranking systems have also rated StFX highly in terms of research publication impact. The Maclean’s university rankings previously rated university research citation impacts until 2020. In that year, StFX was ranked first among all undergraduate universities in Canada in this category.
This research is, in part, made possible by the Government of Canada Research Support Fund.
