Is Rice better than MIT？

[gradschoolphysics]

I was looking at the U.S. News Best Global University for Physics. http://www.usnews.com/education/best-gl ... int=994b08

I saw there are 10 indicator ranking.
"Normalized citation impact" and "Physics percentage of total publications that are among the 10 percent most cited" draw my attention.
According to http://www.usnews.com/education/best-gl ... ethodology

These two indicators seem more important than the other.
But even MIT doesn't rank high in these two indicators.
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-gl ... ogy-166683
The schools that rank high in these two indicators are University of Zurich and Rice University.
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-gl ... ich-505287

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-gl ... ity-227757

Does this mean they are better than MIT? or this just means they are small in size. But according to http://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/ ... ost122.pdf
Rice is about the same size as Caltech. But Caltech's rank is not that high neither.
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-gl ... ogy-110404

[flobadobadie]

Does this mean they are better than MIT?

I imagine the number of citations by article varies between fields. If field X has a significantly higher average number of citations per article, and University Y has a disproportionate number of its faculty working in that field, then they'll do better by that metric.

[gradschoolphysics]

Does this mean they are better than MIT?

I imagine the number of citations by article varies between fields. If field X has a significantly higher average number of citations per article, and University Y has a disproportionate number of its faculty working in that field, then they'll do better by that metric.

solid explanation. Thanks.
But I could not find evidence for it. A quick check of their websites
http://www.physics.rice.edu
and
http://web.mit.edu/physics/people/faculty/index.html
I couldn't see a clear distinction of field distribution.

[tqn]

Good point. Rice is ranked #42 in Physics number of publications that are among the 10 percent most cited, but ranked #1 in Physics percentage of total publications that are among the 10 percent most cited. My interpretation would be Rice produces fewer publications, but most of them are influential and highly cited, thus is ranked higher on the percentage. Same logic applies to the normalized publication impact. One possible explanation is Rice's tenure committee evaluates both research and teaching, thus Rice's assistant professors do not have much "publish or perish" pressure like at other institutions.