Research universities have a strong devotion and advocacy for research in their core academic mission. This is why they are widely recognized for their excellence in research which make them take the most renowned positions in the different worldwide university leagues. In order to examine the uniqueness of this group of universities we analyze the scientific production of a sample of them in a 5 year period of time. On the one hand, we analyze their preferences in research measured with the relative percentage of publications in the different subject areas, and on the other hand, we calculate the similarity between them in research preferences. In order to select a set of research universities, we studied the leading university rankings of Shanghai, QS, Leiden, and Times Higher Education (THE). Although the four rankings own well established and developed methodologies and hold great prestige, we choose to use THE because data were readily available for doing the study we had in mind. Having done that, we selected the twenty academic institutions ranked with the highest score in the last edition of THE World University Rankings 2020 and to contrast their impact, we also, we compared them with the twenty institutions with the lowest score in this ranking. At the same time, we extracted publication data from Scopus database for each university and we applied bibliometrics indicators from Elsevier’s SciVal. We applied the statistical techniques cosine similarity and agglomerative hierarchical clustering analysis to examine and compare affinities in research preferences among them. Moreover, a cluster analysis through VOSviewer was done to classify the total scientific production in the four major fields (health sciences, physical sciences, life sciences and social sciences). As expected, the results showed that top universities have strong research profiles, becoming the leaders in the world in those areas and cosine similarity pointed out that some are more affine among them than others. The results provide clues for enhancing existing collaboration, defining and re-directing lines of research, and seeking for new partnerships to face the current pandemic to find was to tackle down the covid-19 outbreak.

中文翻译：

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量化领先研究型大学的出版偏好


研究型大学对其核心学术使命的研究有着强烈的奉献和倡导。这就是为什么他们因其卓越的研究而受到广泛认可，这使他们在全球不同的大学联盟中占据了最著名的地位。为了检验这组大学的独特性，我们分析了这些大学样本在 5 年时间内的科学生产情况。一方面，我们通过不同学科领域出版物的相对百分比来分析他们的研究偏好，另一方面，我们计算他们在研究偏好上的相似性。为了选择一组研究型大学，我们研究了上海大学、QS、莱顿大学和泰晤士高等教育（THE）的领先大学排名。尽管这四个排名拥有完善和发展的方法论，并享有很高的声誉，但我们选择使用THE，因为数据很容易获得，可以进行我们想要的研究。在此之后，我们选择了上一期2020年泰晤士世界大学排名中得分最高的20所学术机构，为了对比它们的影响，我们还将它们与本次排名中得分最低的20所机构进行了比较。同时，我们从Scopus数据库中提取了每所大学的发表数据，并应用了Elsevier SciVal的文献计量指标。我们应用统计技术余弦相似度和凝聚层次聚类分析来检查和比较他们之间的研究偏好的亲和力。 此外，通过VOSviewer进行聚类分析，对四大领域（健康科学、物理科学、生命科学和社会科学）的总科学成果进行分类。正如预期的那样，结果显示顶尖大学拥有强大的研究实力，成为这些领域的世界领先者，余弦相似度指出，其中一些大学比其他大学更具有亲和力。研究结果为加强现有合作、定义和重新指导研究方向以及寻求新的合作伙伴关系以应对当前的大流行提供了线索，以找到解决 covid-19 疫情的办法。