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University of Tartu - a world-class scientific institution

13.07.2011, 13:47

Essential Science Indicators database has listed University of Tartu in the 1% of the most powerful scientific institutions of biology and biochemistry in the world.

Toivo Maimets, director of UT institute of molecular and cellular biology, comments that during the last couple of decades the university has concentrated strongly on creating the necessary working conditions that would be comparable to those of the top scientific institutions of the world. He says that keeping the honourable position depends the on people who see Tartu as a great place for making world-class science.

ESI database calculates the prestige of the institutions by the number of articles and references connected to them. UT has also been listed in the most influential 1% in 7 other spheres, namely chemistry, clinical medicine, sciences of flora and fauna, environment studies and ecology, social sciences, material sciences and geosciences.

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Ryan: When the Estonian government turns into a Nordic country government that is when one should consider NOT to invest in Estonia.

~The Swede [14.07.2011, 01:43]

Having read the news from UT homepage, I did not question the validness of the information, but after searching the ESI database myself, I have to admit UT really is not mentioned anywhere.
However, according to QS World University Rankings, UT stands at place 301.-350. in life sciences sphere, thus being in the top 1% considering the overall amount of universities, but not appearing in the top 250 lists. The top three are not surprisingly universities of Cambridge, Harvard and Yale.
On the whole UT is listed as 551.-600. university in the world, which is why maybe (as I am not overly familiar with the system) it is not in the Shanghai list.

Sources: http://www.topuniversities.com/institution/university-tartu/wur , http://teadus.err.ee/artikkel?cat=1&id=4666 and http://www.ut.ee/1038564 (unfortunately, the last two are only in Estonian)

Thank you for bringing it to my attention
Merilin

~Merilin Mandel [13.07.2011, 20:33]

Hmm, ISI (owned by Thomson Reuters) publishes a few citation databases. Here is one (it's free) with their top 250 researchers in each field:
http://hcr3.isiknowledge.com/home.cgi

Click on Browse, choose Estonia, and you'll get 0 results.

I think the data in this free database only dates up to 2008 or 2009... but does that mean these Tartu researchers suddenly catapulted into the top list in the last 2-3 years? I suppose it could, but I wonder if this is just a one-time thing or sustainable then.

If you look at other rankings of universities, like one popular ranking (the Shanghai list) of the top 500 universities in the world:
http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp

and there's no universities in Estonia on there.

I was at a major social sciences conference in January and there were 2 Estonians out of 10,000 in attendance. I attended the presentation of the academic paper of one of them, and his research was full of holes and even I could see that as a layperson. This guy was a Ph.D economist at Univ of Tartu.

I'm currently at the largest psych conference in Europe and as of day 1, I haven't seen any poster presentations from universities in Estonia, though I have seen some from Finland. I'll look more closely at tomorrow's presentations, but so far my impression is that while it may be the best in Estonia, Tartu Uni is just not world-class compared to its rivals abroad.

~ameeriklane [13.07.2011, 18:30]