Online College 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 January 16, 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".

RankCollegeScholarly Citations
1Nova Southeastern University9,500
2University of Phoenix4,180
3Regent University3,340
4California University of Pennsylvania2,460
5Walden University 2,160
6Kaplan University1,690
7Liberty University1,450
8Capella University1,420
9Western Governors University1,070
10Berkeley College927
11Jones International University461
12Champlain College398
13Franklin University358
14Upper Iowa University352
15LeTourneau University267
16Grand Canyon University261
17Dickinson State University259
18Fisher College236
19Colorado Technical University217
20Bellevue University201
21American InterContinental University191
22ITT Technical Institute145
23Tiffin University141
24York Technical College120
25Western International University117
26City University109
27Darton College98
28Grantham University82
29Salem International University62
30National American University58
31Peirce College Online 50
32Westwood College33
33Post University31
34Florida Metropolitan University *29
34South University29
36Herzing College23
37Everglades University22
38National University18
39Granite State College16
40Ellis College13
41Florida National College5

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

* Note: Florida Metropolitan University is now known as Everest University, but for the purposes of collecting data for this metric, we used the name "Florida Metropolitan University".

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OEDb's Online College Rankings ranks 41 of the nation's top online colleges by eight different metrics. Please read more about this study or about our methodology for additional information.