Research Impact

What the strategic plan asks

The University of Regina's strategic plan for 2026 to 2035, Together, We Serve, is built around five priorities: learning, discovery, community building, truth and reconciliation, and innovation. The plan commits the University to measuring and reporting its progress openly.

The measures on this page are well-accepted bibliometric indicators of research impact, drawn from the same public data source the rest of this portal uses. Each shows something real and misses something real. No single indicator amounts to a comprehensive measure of research impact; the discussion of what each one captures, and what it leaves out, matters as much as the numbers themselves. The indicators are refreshed and tracked month by month.

The familiar lens: FWCI

Field-Weighted Citation Impact compares citations received against citations expected for work of the same type, subfield, and year, where 1.0 is the world average. Over the window 2021 to 2025, the University of Regina mean FWCI is 2.748. The full definition, calculation, and per-year receipts are on the FWCI page.

FWCI's best-known limit is that it is an average, and averages can be pulled upward by a small number of very highly cited publications. That does not make it wrong; it makes it one lens among several.

Other ways of looking at citation impact

Times Higher Education, whose rankings many universities watch, now uses a suite of research-quality measures rather than a single average. Two of them can be computed transparently from the same OpenAlex data this portal already uses, and both are shown here with their receipts. They are presented for discussion, not as replacements.

Research strength: the 75th percentile

Instead of averaging every publication, this measure asks: how strong is the publication a quarter of the way down from the top? Because it is a percentile, a handful of extremely cited papers cannot move it much, which makes it a robust view of what strong, typical University of Regina research looks like.

Over 2021 to 2025, the 75th percentile of per-publication FWCI is 2.618. Here the 75th percentile (2.618) sits below the mean (2.748): a reminder that a relatively small number of highly cited publications lift the average above what most of the strongest typical output looks like.

Method: per-publication FWCI values are sorted and the value at the 75th percentile position is taken, interpolating between neighbours where the position falls between two values. This is the same method spreadsheet percentile functions use.

Research excellence: the top 10 percent share

This measure asks how much of the University's output the world treats as leading: the share of publications ranking in the global top 10 percent for citations, normalized by field and year. OpenAlex computes the per-publication ranking; this page counts and shows the shares.

Across the whole window, 1,361 works (21.8% of window output) rank in the global top 10 percent, and 194 works (3.1%) in the top 1 percent. As with FWCI, OpenAlex's broad coverage of uncited publications tends to make these shares read higher than subscription databases would report; compare them with each other over time, not with figures from other providers.

Download this table as CSV (research_impact_per_year.csv)

Research influence: weighted citations

The third measure in the Times Higher Education suite weighs citations by how influential the citing publication is, on the idea that not all citations count equally. Computing it requires analysis of the global citation network that this portal does not currently perform, so it is described here for completeness and honesty rather than reported. If the portal's infrastructure grows to support citation-network analysis, this is a natural addition.

Beyond citations: Sustainable Development Goals

Citation measures cannot see what research is about. OpenAlex tags publications to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which offers a different question: how much University of Regina research addresses recognized global challenges? The University's strategic planning has aligned itself with the SDGs, which makes this lens directly relevant to the plan's own language.

A publication can be tagged to more than one goal, or to none, so these counts do not sum to the window total. Tags are assigned by OpenAlex's classification model and are best read as indicative scale, not exact counts.

Tracking the discussion over time

Each monthly refresh adds a row here, so this table becomes a running record of how the indicators move. Publication databases grow and revise continuously, so small movements between months are normal and not by themselves meaningful; the value of this record is the long view.

Download this record as CSV (research_impact_history.csv)