Elsevier: Penn State No. 1 University for Alternative Energy Research

Penn State was recently ranked as the No. 1 university in the world for alternative energy research, according to the SciVal Spotlight Alternative Energy Research Leadership study conducted by Elsevier, a leading publisher of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services.

Overall, Penn State ranked fifth among all research institutions. The top four organizations, respectively: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Helmholtz Centre Berlin for Materials and Energy (Germany), and Forschungszentrum Julich (Germany).

The organizations were ranked according to their "distinctive competencies," which represent expertise in specific research areas. They reveal the degree to which institutions have constructed multidisciplinary networks within their organization focused on achieving specific breakthroughs. Indicating that research within the university is not being done in isolated silos, examining output in distinctive competencies offers a more accurate way of determining leadership in a given area than traditional measurement methods.

The study analyzes the alternative energy work of 3,000 research institutions using SciVal Spotlight, Elsevier's new research performance measurement tool. Moving beyond the traditional method of measuring research output by journal count, the SciVal Spotlight tool is built on a more detailed model of the current structure of science. The model, covering almost all of the science being conducted across the globe, was developed using co-citation analysis of a comprehensive database including 5.6 million separate papers published between 2003 and 2007 and another 2 million of the heavily cited reference works within these papers.

REPORTERS & EDITORS: For more information, please contact Wyatt DuBois in the Smeal College of Business Media Relations Office at 814-863-3798 or wed112@psu.edu.

Penn State's Smeal College of Business offers highly ranked undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, Ph.D., and executive education opportunities to more than 5,500 students at all levels. Featuring academic departments of accounting, finance, management and organization, marketing, risk management, and supply chain and information systems, the college is also home to major research centers such as the Center for Supply Chain Research, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Center for Global Business Studies, and the Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change.

— filed under: Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change, Research Centers

Elsevier: Penn State No. 1 University for Alternative Energy Research

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