Ranking of research output of universities on the basis of the multidimensional prestige of influential fields: Spanish universities as a case of study

A university may be considered as having dimension-specific prestige in a scientific field (e.g., physics) when a particular bibliometric research performance indicator exceeds a threshold value. But a university has multidimensional prestige in a field of study only if it is influential with respect to a number of dimensions. The multidimensional prestige of influential fields at a given university takes into account that several prestige indicators should be used for a distinct analysis of the influence of a university in a particular field of study. After having identified the multidimensionally influential fields of study at a university their prestige scores can be aggregated to produce a summary measure of the multidimensional prestige of influential fields at this university, which satisfies numerous properties. Here we use this summary measure of multidimensional prestige to assess the comparative performance of Spanish Universities during the period 2006–2010.