SDSU gets top research ranking

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BROOKINGS – South Dakota State University achieved its best-ever worldwide and United States’ rankings in the ShanghaiRanking’s 2019 Global Ranking of Academic Subjects. 

SDSU ranked 22nd in the world and fifth in the U.S. based on research productivity in the area of remote sensing for the period 2013-17.

In the 2017 rankings, SDSU was seventh in the U.S. and 27th in the world. It was 12th in the U.S. and 42nd worldwide in the 2018 list.

Xiaoyang Zhang, co-director of the Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence, is developing a tool to monitor crop progress and conditions in near-real time by combining observations from both polar-orbiting and geostationary satellites. 

The project views conditions of corn and soybean crops in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. This proposed tool is expected to significantly improve the temporal and spatial capability of monitoring crop growth.

“The work done by the SDSU Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence significantly impacts not only South Dakota but also the entire U.S. and the world,” said Bob Watrel, who leads the Department of Geography and Geospatial Sciences. 

“In addition to the work done by our faculty, our undergraduate and graduate students provide support throughout the university and our state in remote-sensing research,” he said.

ShanghaiRanking uses four metrics to determine research productivity – number of publications authored, percentage of articles with international collaborators, number of publications in top journals and average impact (measured by citations) of the papers published according to a well-established independent database.