The Humboldt Foundation ranking is a seal of quality confirming the international orientation of a scientific institution's work.
As Deutsche Welle notes, every year more than two thousand scientists spend up to 12 months at German universities or research centers through scholarship programs of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The scholarship holders choose their internship or work location themselves.
Based on data on which organizations they prefer, the foundation compiles a popularity ranking every five years. It is a kind of indicator of the reputation of German science in other countries and how actively it maintains ties in the international community. So, what does the ranking look like in 2017?
Favorite cities
From 2012 to 2016, about six thousand scientists—both experienced and recent PhDs—came to Germany on Humboldt Foundation scholarships. Of these, more than 200 came from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
Three-quarters of all scholarship holders chose universities for their work, while the rest preferred research centers. This trend has remained unchanged for many years. The foundation's press service explained this by the fact that universities have more professors, and accordingly more opportunities to host foreign colleagues for experience exchange.
The love for two metropolises also remains the same: as in previous rankings, over the past five years the majority of foundation scholarship holders interned in Berlin and Munich. The Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, and two universities in the Bavarian capital—Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Technical University of Munich—can boast the greatest attention from foreign scientists. The top five is rounded out by the University of Bonn, the former capital of West Germany.
However, Bonn is not the only medium-sized city that actively attracts researchers from other countries. In addition to it, Göttingen, Heidelberg, Bayreuth, and Aachen also made it into the top 10. The universities of Potsdam and Bochum significantly improved their positions in the list of scientists' favorites.
"The ranking compiled by the Humboldt Foundation is a seal of quality confirming the international orientation of a scientific institution's work. And the degree of importance that a university attaches to this aspect does not depend at all on its size," emphasizes the foundation's president, Helmut Schwarz.
The current study shows that not only universities located in large cities or bearing the title of "elite" are popular abroad. "Geographical diversity is one of the advantages of German science in the international context," emphasizes Helmut Schwarz.
Individual disciplines
The ranking also takes into account data on individual research areas. Thus, scientists working on projects in the humanities or social sciences most often chose Berlin's Free University and Humboldt University, as well as universities in Heidelberg, Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, Bonn, Freiburg, Tübingen, and Münster.
For natural science research, foundation scholarship holders most often preferred the Technical University of Munich and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, universities in Bonn, Münster, Heidelberg, Göttingen, RWTH Aachen University, Berlin's Free University and Technical University, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
In the field of engineering sciences, the favorites are the Technical Universities of Darmstadt, Munich, Berlin, RWTH Aachen University, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, KIT in Karlsruhe, as well as the universities of Bochum, Duisburg-Essen, Hanover, and Stuttgart.
Among non-university research centers, the institutes of the Max Planck Society lead the ranking. The most sought-after for internships were the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, the Potsdam Institute of Colloids and Surfaces, the Institute for Metal Research in Düsseldorf, and the Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr.