Scholarly Profile

The Scholarly Profile of Our Graduate Faculty and Programs

Sara Dolan and Steven Driese, Associate Deans for Research

One requirement for Baylor to become a preeminent Christian research university is that our graduate faculty regularly publish widely cited research. This is especially true for our research doctoral programs. The growing research prowess of our faculty is clearly illustrated in the graph below of the number of articles our faculty publish. We have more than doubled our scholarly productivity of ten years ago, exceeding 1,300 articles per year in the world-wide data base of major peer-reviewed journals maintained by Clarivate Analytics.  This growth has been strategic, consistent, and is moving us increasingly close to the high level of scholarship associated with the strongest research universities.

More broadly, the Office of Institutional Research & Testing maintains an annual Academic Analytics (AcA) database that counts not publications, but also the citations, awards, and grant dollars of every graduate faculty member of every PhD program in the nation. For 2020, AcA’s most recent release, nineteen of our PhD programs are among the strongest in the nation in terms of faculty scholarship, the largest number ever for Baylor.

Our PhD program in Philosophy leads, with its faculty placing among the top 4% of scholars in the nation, and two of our newer PhD programs, Higher Education Studies & Leadership and Entrepreneurship, are also in the top 5% in the nation.  Additionally, the breadth of our highly ranked programs is noteworthy.  Baylor PhD programs in the Humanities, the Social Sciences, the Sciences, and our Professional Programs are all represented on this list.  This is a characteristic of a comprehensive research university and reflects our understanding that “all truth is God’s truth.”  

Highest Ranked PhD Programs in 2020

Two points of temporal reference:  First, five years ago, in 2015, Baylor had only twelve PhD programs ranked in the top half by Academic Analytics. In only five years, we have increased the number of highly ranked doctoral programs measured by the scholarship of our faculty to nineteen.  Second, in 2002, Baylor’s Vision 2012 publicly promised to have “a depth of scholarly excellence and a volume of scholarly output that is found only in schools with first-rate graduate programs.”  Our faculty continue to deliver on that promise.