Methodology

Where the numbers come from, what they mean, and what they don't.

Data source

All publication figures come from OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works, authors, institutions and topics, released under a CC0 license (Priem, Piwowar & Orr, 2022, arXiv:2205.01833). Data was last refreshed on 2026-10-19.

Fields and topics

OpenAlex assigns each paper a primary topic, one of about 4,500 automatically generated topic clusters. agri.science groups 182 of these topics into thirteen fields that follow how agricultural science is usually taught and organized. Each topic belongs to exactly one field, so field totals don't overlap.

Excluded on purpose: broad catch-all clusters that can't be attributed to a discipline, one oversized cluster (about 2.5 million papers) that would dominate every count, pure taxonomy and botany clusters, and companion-animal veterinary topics. Because topics are assigned by an algorithm, individual papers can be misclassified; the figures are reliable for comparing broad patterns, less so for fine distinctions.

Time windows

Universities

A paper counts for a university when at least one author lists it, or one of its sub-units, as an affiliation. Papers with authors from several universities count for each of them. The directory ranks the 100 universities with the largest output in the site's topic set. Universities of applied sciences, colleges and other universities appear in the directory because they have listed study programs - their research figures are shown where OpenAlex has any, but they are not ranked. University systems that only aggregate their campuses are left out so campuses aren't counted twice. On field pages, national umbrella bodies such as ministries are hidden when a more specific research organization under them is listed.

Output is not quality

These figures measure how much a university or country publishes, not how good its research or teaching is. Large institutions and countries with large research systems will always rank high, which is why the site shows no composite ranking. For editorial rankings with their own methodologies, see the QS subject ranking for Agriculture & Forestry or ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects.

Study programs and subject guides

Study programs are compiled by hand from the institutions' official websites, and each one links to the program page it comes from. They cover research universities as well as universities of applied sciences (Fachhochschulen, hogescholen) and agricultural colleges and polytechnics, because many practical agricultural careers start there. "Diploma" marks college programs below bachelor's level, usually two or three years. Admission requirements, tuition and application deadlines change often and are therefore not copied here. The list is not complete; it grows region by region. Where an institution has no page for a program, the entry links to the faculty page and to the official document (study plan or brochure) that describes it.

Study mode: part-time, online, distance and dual (work-integrated) degrees are always labeled as such by the institutions, so they are recorded wherever the program page says so. If the page names no other mode, the program is listed as full-time. We set that default only after reading the program page and finding no wording about part-time, evening, online, distance, dual or similar study; pages we could not read, or that list many programs at once, stay without a mode. If you know a program that can be studied in another mode, tell us.

Language of instruction: recorded when the program page states it. Where it does not, we show the usual language of instruction only if an official national or system-level source states it for higher education in that country (a law, the ministry, the national accreditation or education information portal, or Eurydice) - such programs read "Usually taught in ..." and are not counted as English-taught unless the page says so. Where several languages are common, or no official statement exists, we leave the language empty. The sources are linked on each country page.

The "Studying ..." sections on the subject pages - typical degree names, contents and career fields - are written in general terms. They contain no salary or employment figures, because these differ by country and are not available from one comparable source; the program pages have the specifics.

AgEcon Search

The agricultural economics research page and the latest working papers on the agricultural economics page come from AgEcon Search, harvested weekly through its public OAI-PMH interface. Only bibliographic data is taken (title, authors, date, type, subject categories, series or journal); every entry links to the AgEcon Search record, where the full text is. Papers are kept for the current and the two previous publication years. Subject counts use AgEcon Search's own subject categories as assigned by the depositing institution, so they describe what is being deposited, not the whole discipline.

Highly cited papers

The paper lists show the most-cited articles and reviews from the last two complete years. Citation counts favor reviews and papers published early in the window, and they measure attention, not correctness.