Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention — university ranks

Explore the visualization below to see how universities rank in terms of prestige¹ or production². This visualization supplements the Nature article Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention. You can find links to the code and data used in that paper, as well as to another explorable visualization of how scholars move between universities when they become professors, here.

¹ A university’s prestige rank is a measure of its ability to place its graduates as faculty at other prestigious universities. We use SpringRank to infer prestige hierarchies across academia in toto and, separately, in each domain and field. In order for a university to have a prestige rank in a given field, it must employ faculty in that field; doctoral universities that do not themselves employ faculty in that field are removed from the network before ranking.

² A university’s production rank is a measure of how many faculty it has trained. Production ranks are calculated for academia in toto and, separately, for each domain and field. In order for a university to have a production rank in a given field, it must have trained at least one faculty member who is employed in that field.

The visualization covers 122 networks: academia, 10 domains, and 111 fields. Two of the domains (Public Administration & Policy; Media & Communication) and their fields were excluded from the analyses in the paper and are not in the public data files.