Nature Index honors TU Dortmund University as a “Rising Star”
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Nature Index’s 2018 list of “Rising Stars” ranked TU Dortmund University among the world’s top 50 and number two in Germany. The fields of Chemistry and Physics performed particularly well in the rankings. This placement confirms the excellent research that is taking place at TU Dortmund University and is the result of many top-notch third-party-funded projects and international collaborations. Once a year, the renowned science journal Nature confers the label of “rising stars” on scientific institutions whose index rank has soared significantly.
The Nature Index lists research institutions around the globe by their quantitative publication output in 82 selected quality journals. In addition to absolute publication figures, they also determine the “fractional count”, which measures the number of published articles in relation to the number of institutions involved. Among the disciplines of TU Dortmund University, Physics and Chemistry ranked highest. Overall, the rank of TU Dortmund University in the Nature Index rose by 80% between 2015 and 2017, putting it in 344th place out of a total of more than 9,000 institutions worldwide.
Numerous grant programs as well as research projects with domestic and international partners bear witness to the excellent research performance of TU Dortmund University: The Cluster of Excellence RESOLV (Ruhr Explores Solvation) is a collaboration with Ruhr-Universität Bochum and five other partners exploring the role of solvents. In this project, which receives 28 million Euros in funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG), chemists and physicists work together to find opportunities for application in green chemistry, medical technologies and photovoltaics.
Close domestic and international partnerships
Nature identified the Max Planck Society as the strongest partner of TU Dortmund University at the national level. In numerous collaborations with the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology, TU Dortmund University was able to achieve internationally acclaimed successes in the field of drug discovery. Nature Index identifies the Russian Academy of Sciences as the strongest international partner of TU Dortmund University. Especially in the DFG’s Collaborative Research Center Transregio (TRR) 160, headed by Prof. Manfred Bayer from the Faculty of Physics, TU Dortmund University works together closely with research institutions in Russia. Just like its collaborations at national level, the collaboration on “Coherent manipulation of interacting spin excitations in tailored semiconductors” has delivered high-profile research results.
“Our researchers have been continuously expanding their collaboration with international colleagues as well as with corporate partners,” Prof. Gabriele Sadowski, Vice President Research at TU Dortmund University, confirms. INVITE is an example of successful corporate cooperation: The research center is a public-private partnership between TU Dortmund University, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and Bayer AG. At the Chempark Leverkusen, the three partners conduct joint research on innovative technologies for administering medications.
Nature Index
Since 2014, Nature has been publishing its annual Nature Index that tracks the authorship of publications in 82 quality journals. The journals are determined by surveys taken among more than 6,600 scientists. The ranking is based on the absolute number of articles (article count) as well as the percentage share of institutions in those publications (fractional count).