N.C. State placed 202nd among world universities in an objective ranking of research productivity, impact and excellence. Although the University held the exact same overall position in 2012, it declined in measures of several research-specific disciplines. 

The Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities, released annually by National Taiwan University, is entirely based on statistics related to scientific papers. 

For the year 2013, N.C. State ranked 24th for agriculture, 79th for engineering, 212th for life sciences and 286th for physics.

The ranking provides insight into the relative strengths and weakness of a university’s administration and resource allocation, the report said. 

Several other North Carolina institutions made the list, including UNC-Chapel Hill, which ranked 25th overall, and Duke University, which ranked 17th.

When ranking universities, NTU used a variety of categories, including the number of articles published during the last 11 years, the number of articles cited during the past 11 years and the number of highly-cited articles. 

NTU considered 888 universities worldwide, and narrowed the list to produce the top 500. The report’s authors cautioned readers from interpreting a difference in rankings too closely. 

“It should be noted that many universities obtained similar scores, and the slight differences of the final scores must be interpreted carefully,” the report said. “A university’s slightly higher score than another university’s may not necessarily suggest its superiority in scientific research because the two universities might be in very close proximity in the ranking.”

This year, the University is up from 25th in agriculture, down from 75th in engineering, down from 203rd in life sciences and down from 221st in physics.