Ranking research institutions by the number of highly-cited articles per scientist

• The number of HCAs per researcher varies across fields.
• After classifying researchers by field we rank universities by HCAs per researcher.
• We also rank universities by discipline.

In the literature and on the Web we can readily find research excellence rankings for organizations and countries by either total number of highly-cited articles (HCAs) or by ratio of HCAs to total publications. Neither are indicators of efficiency. In the current work we propose an indicator of efficiency, the number of HCAs per scientist, which can complement the productivity indicators based on impact of total output. We apply this indicator to measure excellence in the research of Italian universities as a whole, and in each field and discipline of the hard sciences.