By Joe Luk

A recent study indicates that UCLA contributed the greatest number of papers to the field of urban studies over the five year period from 2004 to 2008. Based on each institution’s percentage of 5,518 papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed urban studies journals, UCLA ranked first with 76 papers, representing 1.38 % of the field.

Following UCLA are Ohio State University with 68 papers, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill with 65, and University of Michigan with 63.   The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and UC Berkeley were tied for fifth place with 62 papers each.

This data which is indicative of UCLA’s intellectual leadership in the field, is congruent with data presented in a  2004 study published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research which ranked  the UCLA Department of Urban Planning the top urban planning department in the nation on the basis of two combined indicators: the number of citations of faculty research and the number of publications in peer-reviewed journals listed in the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI).    That study entitled “Faculty Quality at U.S. Graduate Planning Schools,” was done by Professors Deden Rukmana, Bhuiyan Alam, and Bruce Stiftel.