Each year the Leiden-based CWTS draws up a list of all universities and ranks them according to different aspects, one of these being the percentage of publications in international scientific journals containing co-authors from industry. For TU/e this is 13.4 percent. There is only one university in the world that betters this: China’s Petrol University Beijing. The CWTS bases the ranking for 2017 on data from 2012 until 2015.

The real number of publications in which collaboration with industry plays a role is much higher than this percentage, by the way. For many of these kinds of publication no co-author from industry is mentioned on paper, so these do not count towards the CWTS indicator.

In every previous edition of the Leiden ranking, TU/e topped the list. The Chinese oil university is a newcomer on the CWTS list. The Leiden institute has expanded the group of universities surveyed in the past few years from the five hundred most relevant to nine hundred. One of the other CWTS indicators is the top 1 percent of most cited articles in international journals, and TU/e also performs well in this respect. Eindhoven is second only to Delft within the Netherlands. Earlier this year TU/e topped the Times Higher Education ranking that examined collaboration with companies from the top 25 most innovating companies worldwide.

Since 2013 TU/e has had its own program, called Impuls, geared to encouraging research collaboration with industry. To date this program has led to 278 PhD studies, together with Philips and ASML, among others.

Research with industry not only benefits the parties involved but it also helps to boost quality. This is evident from a study in 2014.

Source: Press team TU/e