What Do Dramatic Changes To U.S. News Medical School Rankings Methodology Portend For Law Schools: 'Transparency Credits' For Non-Boycotting Schools, Faculty Citation Counts?

Following up on my previous post, Law School Rankings Revolt Spreads To Medical Schools: #1 Harvard Will Not Send Data To U.S. News:  Robert Morse (Chief Data Strategist, U.S. News), Plans for Publication of the 2024 Best Medical Schools:

[W]e will be making the following changes to the 2024 Best Medical Schools rankings and data collection process. ...

First, we will no longer issue or take into account peer and residency director surveys as part of the Medical Schools: Research and Medical Schools: Primary Care methodology. While we still consider reputation an important factor in graduate programs, recent data indicates that many residency program directors do not consider medical school reputation in residency matching and instead focus on individual metrics such as Step scores, research and letters of recommendation.

Next, due to the unavailability of free, publicly available data for students surrounding the academic achievements of entering students such as median MCAT scores and GPAs, acceptance rate, school enrollment and faculty statistics, and total research funding from all sources, we will award a transparency credit to institutions who submit the U.S. News statistical survey and/or include that information on their school’s website for academic year 2023-2024 for prospective students to access. Please note that in order to receive the credit, the information must be posted on the school’s website no later than January 8, 2024.

We are excited to launch a first-ever survey of 233,000 individuals who recently graduated or are currently in U.S. medical schools.

Those surveyed will range from fourth-year medical and osteopathic students to physicians who have up to 10 years experience in practice. This groundbreaking survey, developed in partnership with Doximity, will measure various aspects of a physician’s medical school education, including how well the education they received has set them up for future success. Data from this survey may be incorporated in a variety of ways to benefit students, including schools’ profiles, rankings and education articles.

In addition to launching the new medical school experience survey, U.S. News will incorporate a series of bibliometric indicators as ranking factors in the 2024 Best Medical Schools methodology. These analyses allow us to further identify how impactful a medical school's faculty has been in the field of medicine, and are based on publications and citations.