I disagree.  While having some index of how all of our departments perform over time is great, I think the NIH department rankings are meaningless. NIH does NOT really rank by departments but by department categories.  And as far as I can see, the NIH categories are based on the order of words in the department name.  Thus, Dept of Pathology and Cell Biology is under Path, while Cell Biology and Pathology is under Anat/Cell Bio.

For our school, there is no one-to-one correspondence between our depts and the NIH groupings.  This means that the same is surely happening elsewhere.  The result is that a department is comparing itself with an arbitrarily assembled bunch of competitors.  And the schools that have lumped departments get higher rankings.

Further, in some cases departments within some medical schools do not exist at other medical schools because there are stand alone schools that better house those interests.  Ex.  in NIH dept rankings, departments of epidemiology or public health at med schools of University X do not compete with NIH funds going into the Schools of Public Health at University Y.   The uncritical observer looking only at med school rankings applauds University X but concludes that University Y has no public health research.

As long as J. Smith, PhD, working on THIS molecule in THIS tissue related to THIS disease gets his degree and has the potential to be employed by departments with many many different names, it makes no sense for NIH to keep track.

Charlie

At 02:34 PM 5/11/2006, you wrote:
>I just heard a rumor that NIH was going to stop ranking medical schools by department. I surely hope that it isn't true.  Has anyone else heard anything about this?
>
>Also, if they are thinking about it, let's get out the torches and pitchforks and see what we can do to influence them to continue to give us this valuable tracking data.
>-Jennifer
>
>
>
>Jennifer Morgan Shambrook, MHA
>
>Associate Chair for Research Administration
>Co-Director Division of Public Psychiatry
>Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science
>Medical University of South Carolina
>67 President Street, Suite 504
>Charleston, South Carolina  29425
>
>voice:  843-792-0191
>fax:  843-792-0048
>email:  xxxxxx@musc.edu
>
>
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