|
Financial Aid
Online College Ranking by Scholarly Citations
Update: OEDb has released the 2008 rankings. This is an archived page from the 2007 rankings.
As studied by Mike Tung, a graduate student at Stanford University, 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, 2007 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".
| Rank | College | Scholarly Citations |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | University of Phoenix | 3,020 |
| 2 | University of Maryland University College | 1,110 |
| 3 | Capella University | 1,050 |
| 4 | Western Governors University | 834 |
| 5 | Jones International University | 351 |
| 6 | Cardean University | 215 |
| 7 | Grand Canyon University | 192 |
| 8 | Fisher College | 177 |
| 9 | Colorado Technical University | 174 |
| 10 | Strayer University | 146 |
| 11 | American InterContinental University | 145 |
| 12 | Central Texas College | 137 |
| 13 | Bellevue University | 101 |
| 14 | Western International University | 79 |
| 15 | Northcentral University | 68 |
| 16 | City University | 24 |
| 16 | Florida Metropolitan University | 24 |
| 18 | Westwood College | 21 |
| 19 | South University | 14 |
| 20 | Granite State College | 9 |
| 20 | Post University | 9 |
Note: There were some instances for which this search query had to be adjusted:
- The search query used for City University became "City University Bellvue" because otherwise it is an ambiguous term.
- The search query used for Fisher College became "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 Post University became "Post University Waterbury" because otherwise it is an ambiguous term.
- The search query used for South University became "South University Savannah" OR "South University Online" because otherwise it is an ambiguous term.
View other rankings:
« Previous: Ranking by Retention Rate | Overall Rankings | Next: Ranking by Student-Faculty Ratio »
OEDb's Online College Rankings ranks 21 of the nation's top online colleges by eight different metrics. Please read more about this study or about our methodology for additional information.
