For over a century, mainstream colleges, universities, and institutions of higher learning have been evaluated and judged based on the quantity and quality of the research and scholarly reports they publish and put out. The amount of scholarly citation from other scholars is a recognized indicator of the caliber of a higher education institution’s academic work. The truth of the matter is that a college is only as good as its students and faculty. The scholarly citation figures listed below were generated using Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/). This tool provides an excellent way to search for scholarly literature, which is a useful proxy for the number of scholarly citations a college receives.
Each figure listed in the “Scholarly Citations” column below is the approximate number of results that Google Scholar returned when performing a search for a particular college’s name (within quotation marks).
*Ranking by Scholarly Citations 2011
Rank | College | Scholarly Citations | ||||||||
1 | Nova Southeastern University | 11,940 | ||||||||
2 | University of Phoenix | 5,191 | ||||||||
3 | Walden University | 2893 | ||||||||
4 | Liberty University Online | 2,220 | ||||||||
5 | Capella University | 1893 | ||||||||
6 | Western Governors University | 1,300 | ||||||||
7 | DeVry University | 621 | ||||||||
8 | Jones International University | 523 | ||||||||
9 | Champlain College | 498 | ||||||||
10 | Upper Iowa University | 453 | ||||||||
11 | Bellevue University | 395 | ||||||||
12 | Colorado Technical University | 346 | ||||||||
13 | Grand Canyon University | 323 | ||||||||
14 | Keiser University | 236 | ||||||||
15 | Ashford University | 179 | ||||||||
16 | Kaplan University | 132 | ||||||||
17 | North Central University | 129 | ||||||||
18 | Western International University | 111 | ||||||||
19 | Westwood College | 96 | ||||||||
20 | Salem International University | 96 | ||||||||
21 | Everest University | 68 | ||||||||
22 | Post University | 63 | ||||||||
23 | Rasmussen College | 51 | ||||||||
24 | Everglades University | 43 | ||||||||
25 | South University | 41 | ||||||||
View all Online Colleges» | ||||||||||
For more information regarding these rankings, we invite you to consult the in-depth documentation on our ranking methodology. Disclaimer: Many online colleges are not included in above rankings due to lack of publicly available data. |