Computer science at UC San Diego is ranked #14 in the world, and #13 in the United States, according to the 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). For the third year in a row, UC San Diego overall was also ranked the #14 best university in the world (#12 in the U.S.), while the engineering program in general also ranked #14. The rankings are released by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
In addition to broad subject fields such as life sciences and engineering, ARWU ranks schools in five specific fields. Among those, UC San Diego's best performance was in computer science (#14), trailed by chemistry (#18), economics (#19), mathematics (#30), and physics (which ranked below #51).
“It is an honor for UC San Diego to be recognized as a world-class university with strengths across multiple disciplines,” said Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla. “This recognition can be attributed to our stellar faculty and outstanding students who are dedicated to producing research that changes lives, solves critical problems and benefits society.”
The Academic Ranking of World Universities uses five indicators to evaluate world universities in the computer science field: the number of alumni and staff winning Turing Awards; the number of highly-cited researchers in computer science; the number of articles indexed in the Science Citation Index - Expanded in Computer Science fields; and the percentage of paper published in the top 20% of computer science journals compared to total publications in all computer science journals.
Given that UC San Diego is a relatively young campus and that CSE boasts no alumni nor current staff winners of the prestigious Turing Award (the highest in computer science), the university gets zero points on the first two scores that make up 25% of the total field score. On the other hand, CSE has a strong track record publishing in top journals and getting cited by other academics, which largely accounts for the score that qualified the department to be ranked #14 in the world.