Excellent positions for Mainz University in the international CWTS Leiden Ranking 2020

JGU ranks first among the 54 listed German universities in terms of the number of hybrid open-access publications

27 July 2020

The CWTS Leiden Ranking compares the quality and number of scientific publications produced by approximately 1,200 universities worldwide. In nearly all indicators, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) ranks among the top 20 German universities, achieving excellent results once again this year overall and within all individual academic fields. For example, JGU is in sixth place in Germany with regard to the proportion of its publications that are considered to be in the top 1 percent in their field worldwide. In the collaboration indicators category, JGU is third as measured in terms of "long distance collaborative publications".

The open access indicator, first introduced in 2019, proves just how progressive JGU is when it comes to the online distribution of open-access academic papers. The high proportion of open-access publications that JGU releases online places it in multiple indicators among the top ten in Germany; in the case of hybrid open-access publications (the proportion of publications that are published both online as open-access versions and in print as subscription versions), it ranks first out of the 54 listed German universities.

Good ranking results in individual academic fields

Furthermore, JGU's individual subject fields once again rank highly among German universities. In the Physical Sciences, JGU once again scores as one of the top five in Germany with regard to the indicators of scientific impact, collaboration, and open access. Its collaborative international publications in the fields Mathematics and Computer Sciences as well as in the Life and Earth Sciences put JGU in several instances among the top ten universities in Germany. JGU's publications in the Biomedical and Health Sciences as well as in the Social Sciences and the Humanities are among the most frequently cited in their respective disciplines, with the university achieving places in the top ten for scientific impact rankings in Germany in all of these fields.

The CWTS Leiden Ranking has been published annually since 2007 by the Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University in the Netherlands. The internationally renowned research-oriented university ranking is based on analyses of the publications of the 1,176 leading research universities worldwide, using as its source the Web of Science publication database.