U-Multirank study on university research strength: Older, wiser?

U-Multirank’s team divided 1200 universities into four groups based on their founding year: before 1870; 1870 - 1945; 1945 - 1980; and after 1980. The results showed that the likelihood of a group’s universities scoring top grades on research performance indicators increased with their age. This trend was displayed across all four measures of research performance used by U-Multirank: citation rate, total number of publications, number of publications relative to the number of students and the proportion of top cited publications.  For instance, 38% of universities in the group of institutions founded before 1870 received the top score on citation rate (defined as the average number of times that the university's publications are cited), compared to just 10% of the universities founded after 1980 scoring equally well on this measure. More...