The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science has been ranked second in Canada by Maclean's magazine's brand new program rankings.
The methodology of Maclean’s program rankings combine five indicators to provide a picture of the best Canadian universities in the 10 program areas. Each of the five indicators is assigned a weight to come up with an overall score.
"The five indicators are: field weighted citation impact (FWCI) at 35 per cent, fractional publications at 10 per cent, fractional citations at 10 per cent, program reputation at 35 per cent and research reputation at 10 per cent," explains the Maclean's website. "FWCI measures the impact of research at each university by calculating how often a paper gets cited; it is normalized based on the global standards within each discipline, allowing universities to compare their performance to the world average. Fractional publications measure the volume of papers published at each university, adjusting for papers with multiple authors by lowering the count accordingly. Fractional citations measure how often a paper was cited, and also take into account if there are multiple authors on a paper. The reputation data reflect the views of more than 1,200 faculty and senior administrators across Canada. Academics were asked to identify their area of expertise, then asked to indicate their opinion on which universities were offering the best programs and conducting the best research in that area. The raw scores for all five indicators are calculated, the scores are then converted to Z scores to show the relative position of each school within the distribution for each measure."
Maclean's is best known for their university rankings. In the 2016 rankings, Waterloo was ranked second in the comprehensive category and for the 24th year in a row, was ranked as Canada's most innovative university.
