York University’s Kinesiology and Health Science program in the Faculty of Health is the best in Canada, according to a new ranking released by ShanghaiRanking’s 2017 Global Ranking of Sport Science Schools and Departments.
The program has been ranked No. 1 in Canada, No. 3 in North America and No. 16 in the world by the prestigious ShanghaiRanking’s report, surpassing its 2016 rankings of No. 3 in Canada and No. 21 worldwide.
“To be ranked in the top 20 in the world and the best in Canada in any discipline is exceptional in its own right, but to have improved our ranking in a single year by five places internationally and to top spot in Canada is truly extraordinary,” said Paul McDonald, dean, Faculty of Health. “It validates the efforts the school has been making to continuously improve upon its 50-year legacy of excellence in groundbreaking research, innovative education and community engagement. The results exemplify York University’s basic values that it is possible to simultaneously be accessible, diverse and world class.”
York’s Kinesiology and Health Science program is the third largest program at the University, and was considered along with programs from 293 universities worldwide and 25 universities in Canada.
On a worldwide scale, UBC placed 17th and McMaster University placed 22nd, and both of these programs have sport medicine clinics associated with them.
Sport science schools and departments are selected and ranked using several indicators of academic or research performance, including research output (papers indexed in Web of Science and total citations), research quality (citations per paper and papers published in top 25 per cent of journals) and international collaboration (percentage of internationally collaborated papers of an institution).
The bibliometric data is collected from the Web of Science database with a time window of five years.
ShanghaiRanking’s global ranking in 2016 was the first attempt to rank a group of institutions and units with the same subject focus on an international scale.
“The School of Kinesiology and Health Science is delighted to be recognized as one of the top research academic units in the world and No. 1 in Canada,” said Angelo Belcastro, chair, School of Kinesiology and Health Science. “This recognition is a tribute to the quality and dedication of our school’s faculty, staff and graduate students.”
Graduate program director Alison Macpherson said, “Our graduate program includes world-class professors and students who embody excellence in our diverse research programs.”
ShanghaiRanking’s Global Ranking of Sport Science Schools and Departments maintains the use of transparent methodology and third-party data, but adopts an innovative methodology to rank universities from a unit level.
For more information about the methodology and indicators of the ranking, visit shanghairanking.com.