UNC Ranks First Among Coronavirus Researchers

Posted on April 17, 2020

Carolina was the highest ranked U.S. university in the world for coronavirus research in early April, according to a Microsoft Academic rating system based on how often other researchers cited articles written by the University’s faculty members.

The University ranked No. 8 in saliency, surpassed in the U.S. only by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (second) and the National Institutes of Health (fifth). The top worldwide institution was the University of Hong Kong.

In the same ranking system, Carolina ranked fourth in the number of citations of its research and sixth in the number of publications.

The “saliency” ranking is particularly relevant because it goes beyond the mere accounting of citations, according to Microsoft Academic. Saliency “imposes weighting on each citation based on the factors of the citing sources, including the reputation and the age of each citation.”

Microsoft Academics is a free public web search engine for academic publications and literature developed by Microsoft Research. Information on the website is based on the Microsoft Academic Graph data set, which contains over 233 million publications and their related academic entities. Microsoft Research uses its partner web browser Bing to discover research content from around the world and then applies artificial intelligence to filter and analyze the data.

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