We are a team of academics and data scientists working to provide an objective, non-gameable, influence-based ranking for the people, schools, and disciplinary programs that make up higher education. Our aim is to identify and foster what’s best in higher education.
AcademicInfluence.com is committed to providing the best academic rankings available anywhere on the web. Our ranking metrics highlight the top schools, disciplinary programs, and academic thought leaders, but they can also be customized to the needs and interests of individuals (see, for instance, our Custom College Ranking tool).
Academic rankings are important, and everyone with a stake in education needs to know about them. Unfortunately, not all rankings are insightful or accurate. Many are in fact misleading and biased. Our aim is to do academic rankings right. Our watchword is that better rankings make for better educational choices and promote better educational outcomes.
In creating our ranking methodology, we engineered an innovative and unbiased ranking technology that employs machine learning to measure the impact of work produced by the world’s top institutions and academics. Accordingly, our InfluenceRanking™ engine brings to light and evaluates the influence of top institutions and academics across the world. Influence thus becomes our master criterion for assessing academic excellence.
In building our influence-based rankings, we insisted that they exhibit three key virtues:
AcademicInfluence.com is an incredibly rich and varied website, with many powerful features to help readers explore the world of higher education. To assist our readers in understanding all that we offer, and thus not to miss anything of value on this website, please visit the following pages, which give additional context and rationale to our mission:
The pages above describe the nuts and bolts of AcademicInfluence.com and its approach to ranking persons, schools, and disciplinary programs by influence. What follows below are more specialized articles — white papers — that delve into deeper aspects of our work on academic influence, and which in turn call for further explanation and clarification.
Because AcademicInfluence.com is such an ambitious site, we want to call attention to the following especially noteworthy offerings: