MU Nursing Tigers

Garnering National Attention

December 6 , 2007

COLUMBIA , Mo. – It's a great time to be a tiger – a Mizzou Tiger that is. As the Mizzou football team squares off for the Cotton Bowl, the Mizzou Nursing tigers have been ranked as third in the nation for faculty productivity by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

This is a mighty feat for one of the smaller schools on the University of Missouri campus. Even a greater feat if you compare the size of the MU Sinclair School of Nursing to others in the top 10 list – University of California at San Francisco, Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Washington and Duke University just to name a few.

According to the latest Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, based on data from 2006, the School's tenure-track faculty are number three in the country in the nursing profession (see chart below).

“It is an honor to be recognized nationally for the work and professional expertise we have added to the health-care profession,” said Vicki Conn, Associate Dean for Research. “This is evidence of the depth and strength of our research faculty. They are innovative, forward thinking and dedicated to the profession and now being recognized for those strengths.”

However, being ranked in the top 10 in a new ranking system isn't a big deal unless there are other good schools on that list. “The big schools are on this list,” Conn said. “These are the same institutions we compete against for NIH grant funding, graduate students and faculty members.”

This rating uses Scopus, states a 2006 article by Inside Higher Ed.com, a database that compiles journal publication and citation data from more than 15,000 journals, and counts books using Amazon.com. Grant data is collected from federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (but not the Department of Defense, since it does not release data on grants to individuals).

Information on honors and awards comes from the Web sites of 55 organizations, including the Nobel and MacArthur Foundations. Faculty lists are collected from university Web sites, the article said. The rankings were developed by Lawrence Martin, dean of the graduate school at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

This latest recognition is consistent with other national evidence of the School's amazing success. “An example would be the Delaware study,” Conn said, “which found the School is at 279 percent of the national average with grants per regular faculty at $197,020 compared to the national median of $70,613.”

All that being said, it's a great time to be a MU Tiger.

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