OEDb's Online College Rankings 2009: Ranking by Scholarly Citations

The amount of citations from other scholars is a widely recognized indicator of the importance of academic work. Mainstream colleges and universities often are judged by the quantity, quality, and importance of the research they put out, and there is no reason that online colleges shouldn't be likewise judged. A college is only as good as its students and faculty. Google Scholar provides a way to search for scholarly literature, which makes it a useful proxy for the amount of citations a particular college receives.

The data in the "Scholarly Citations" column refers to the number of results that Google Scholar returned on December 4, 2008 for the following search query syntax (with the quotation marks): "College Name". For example, for the University of Phoenix, the search query we used was "University of Phoenix".

Note: There were some instances for which this search query had to be adjusted:

• The search query used for City University was "City University" "Bellevue, WA" because otherwise it is an ambiguous term.
• The search query used for Fisher College was "Fisher College" -"Ohio State" -"John Fisher" because (1) the name of Ohio State University's business school is "Fisher College" and (2) there is a St. John Fisher College for which we did not want to return results.
• The search query used for Franklin University was "Franklin University Ohio" -"Benjamin Franklin" -"Rosalind Franklin" because otherwise it is an ambiguous term.
• The search query used for Kaplan University was "Kaplan University" -"University of" because otherwise it is an ambiguous term.
• The search query used for Keiser University was "Keiser University" Florida OR FL because otherwise it is an ambiguous term.
• The search query used for National University was "National University La Jolla, CA" because otherwise it is an ambiguous term.
• The search query used for Post University was "Post University" Waterbury because otherwise it is an ambiguous term.
• The search query used for South University was "South University Savannah" OR "South University Online" because otherwise it is an ambiguous term.

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OEDb's Online College Rankings ranks 44 of the nation's top online colleges by eight different metrics. Please read more about this study or about our methodology for additional information.