Tomorrow, I’ll be unveiling the 2025 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, recognizing the 200 university-based scholars who had the biggest influence on educational practice and policy last year. This will be the 15th annual edition of the rankings. Today, I want to run through the methodology used to generate those rankings.

The list is comprised of university-based scholars who focus primarily on educational questions (with “university-based” meaning a formal university affiliation). Scholars who do not have a formal affiliation on a university website are ineligible.

The 150 finishers from last year automatically qualified for a spot in this year’s Top 200, so long as they accumulated at least 15 “active points” in last year’s scoring. (This gauges current activity by including all categories except Google Scholar and Book Points, as those metrics measure career-spanning influence.) The automatic qualifiers were then augmented by “at-large” additions chosen by the RHSU Selection Committee, a disciplinarily, methodologically, and ideologically diverse group of scholars who had automatically qualified for this year’s rankings.

I’m indebted to the 2024 RHSU Selection Committee for its assistance and want to acknowledge its members: Bridget Terry Long (Harvard), Carol Tomlinson (U. Virginia), Carolyn Heinrich (Vanderbilt), Dan Goldhaber (U. Washington), Donna Ford (Ohio State), Doug Harris (Tulane), Eric Hanushek (Stanford), Ernest Morrell (Notre Dame) Helen Ladd (Duke), Ivory Toldson (Howard), Jeffrey Henig (Columbia), Jonathan Plucker (Johns Hopkins), Kevin Welner (CU Boulder), Laura Perna (U. Penn), Linda Darling-Hammond (Stanford), Marty West (Harvard), Marybeth Gasman (Rutgers), Patrick Wolf (U. Arkansas), Pedro Noguera (USC), Sam Wineburg (Stanford), Shaun Harper (USC), Susanna Loeb (Stanford), Thomas Kane (Harvard), and Tyrone Howard (UCLA).

So that’s how the Top 200 list was compiled. How were the actual rankings calculated? Each scholar was scored in eight categories, yielding a maximum possible score of 200. Scores are calculated as follows:

Google Scholar Score: This figure gauges the number of widely cited articles, books, or papers a scholar has authored. For this purpose, I use each scholar’s “h-index.” This is a useful, popular way to measure the breadth and impact of a scholar’s work. It involves organizing a scholar’s works in descending order of how often each is cited and then identifying the point at which the number of oft-cited works exceeds the cite count for the least frequently cited. For instance, a scholar who had 20 works that were each cited at least 20 times but whose 21st most commonly cited work was cited just 10 times would score a 20. The measure recognizes that bodies of scholarship influence how important questions are understood and discussed. The search was conducted using the advanced search “author” filter in Google Scholar. For those scholars who have created a Google Scholar account, their h-index was available at a glance. For those scholars without a Google Scholar account, a hand search was used to calculate their score while culling out works by other, similarly named, individuals. While performing this search, results labeled “[CITATION]” were excluded. This score was capped at 50. (This search was conducted on Dec. 9–10.)

Book Points: A search on Amazon tallied the number of books a scholar has authored, co-authored, or edited. Scholars received 2 points for a single-authored book, 1 point for a co-authored book in which they were the lead author, and a half-point for co-authored books in which they were not the lead author or for any edited volume. The search was conducted using an “Advanced Books Search” for the scholar’s first and last name. (On a few occasions, a middle initial or name was used to avoid duplication with authors who had the same name.) “Out of print” and not-yet-released volumes were excluded, as were reports, commissioned studies, multiple editions of the same book, special editions of magazines or journals, and books that were only released as e-books. We did not award points to series editors. We only included books written in English. This measure reflects the conviction that the visibility, packaging, and permanence of books gives them an outsized role in influencing policy and practice. Book points were capped at 20. (This search was conducted on Dec. 10.)

Highest Amazon Ranking: This reflects the scholar’s highest-ranked book on Amazon. The search was conducted using an “Advanced Books Search” for the scholar’s first and last name and identifying the highest-ranked book written by that scholar. The “Best Sellers Rank” is different for each version—paperback, hardcover, and electronic—of the book, so the highest-ranked version of those three was used. The number was then subtracted from 400,000, and the result was divided by 20,000 to yield a maximum score of 20. (In other words, a scholar’s best book had to rank in Amazon’s top 400,000 to earn points.) Because Amazon’s ranking algorithm is volatile, the result is an imperfect measure but one that conveys real information about whether a scholar has penned a book that is influencing discussion of education. (This search was conducted on Dec. 9.)

Education Press Mentions: This measures the number of times the scholar was quoted or mentioned in Education Week, the Chronicle of Higher Education, or Inside Higher Education during 2024. Searches were conducted using each scholar’s first and last name. Searches included common diminutives and were conducted both with and without middle initials. Because searches occasionally returned results about the wrong individual, we hand-searched the text of each result to ensure the scholar was actually mentioned in the article. For the Chronicle of Higher Education, posts mentioned in the weekly book lists are excluded, as are mentions in the “Transitions” column. “Education Week Press Discontinued Titles” results on Education Week were also excluded. (And stories about scandals are excluded, as that’s not the kind of press attention that reflects scholarly influence.) Appearances in the Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed. were averaged (so as not to double-weight higher education), and that tally was added to the number of times a scholar appeared in Education Week. The resulting figure was multiplied by five, with total Ed. Press points then capped at 30. (These searches were conducted on Dec. 9.)

Web Mentions: This reflects the number of times a scholar was referenced, quoted, or otherwise mentioned online in 2024. The search was conducted using Google. The search terms were each scholar’s name and university. Using affiliation serves a dual purpose: It avoids confusion due to common names and increases the likelihood that mentions are related to university-affiliated activity. Variations of a scholar’s name (such as common diminutives and middle initials) were included in the search, if applicable. In the rare instances where a scholar shared the same name as another person at their institution, we sampled the search results, calculated what proportion of those results were for the edu-scholar, and adjusted the overall score accordingly. Points were calculated by dividing total mentions by 60 and capped at 25. (This search was conducted on Dec. 10.)

Newspaper Mentions: A ProQuest search was used to determine the number of times a scholar was quoted or mentioned in U.S. newspapers. Again, searches used a scholar’s name and affiliation; diminutives and middle initials, if applicable, were included in the results. We removed duplicate articles by hand. The tally was multiplied by five, and points were capped at 30. (The search was conducted on Dec. 10.)

Syllabus Points: This seeks to measure a scholar’s impact on what is being studied by today’s college students. This metric was scored using OpenSyllabus.org, the most comprehensive extant database of syllabi that houses over 21 million syllabi from universities in 140 countries. This syllabus-points metric measures what gets assigned, which offers a snapshot of how widely a scholar’s work is being read in relevant courses. The search function makes it difficult to score a scholar’s whole body of work, so the result is only for the ubiquity of each scholar’s top-ranked text. The score reflects the number of times that text appeared on syllabi, with the tally then divided by 20. The score was capped at 20 points. (This search was conducted on Dec. 10.)

Congressional Record Mentions: A simple name search in the Congressional Record was used to determine whether a scholar appeared in the record in 2024. Scholars who appeared received 5 points. (This search was conducted on Dec. 10.)

There are lots of provisos when it comes to the results. Different disciplines value books and articles differently. Senior scholars have had more opportunity to have exerted influence (and, for what it’s worth, the results are unapologetically designed to favor a substantial body of scholarly work). And readers may think more highly of some categories than others. That’s all well and good. The intent is to spur discussion about the nature of constructive public influence: who’s doing it, how much it matters, and how to gauge a scholar’s contribution.

A few notes regarding questions that arise every year:

• There are some academics who dabble (quite successfully) in education but for whom education is only a sideline. For a scholar to qualify, education must constitute a substantial slice of their scholarship.
• Scholars sometimes change institutions in the course of a year. For the categories where affiliation is used, searches are conducted using a scholar’s affiliation as checked during the summer or early fall. This avoids concerns about double-counting and reduces the burden on my overworked RAs.
• Some eligible scholars wind up assuming deanships or serving as university provosts or presidents. The rule is that education school deans and provosts are ranked if their scholar page indicates that they are also active researchers but that presidents are not ranked.
• It goes without saying that tomorrow’s list represents only a sliver of the nation’s education researchers. For those interested in scoring additional scholars, it’s simple to do so using this scoring formula. Indeed, the exercise was designed so that anyone can generate a comparable rating for a given scholar in a half hour or less.
• This is an imperfect and evolving exercise. Questions and suggestions are welcome. And if ranked scholars would like to have their names listed differently or have their discipline categorized differently, I’ll be as responsive as feasible within the bounds of consistency.

Finally, a note of thanks: For the hard work of coordinating the Selection Committee, assembling the list of nominees, and crunching and double-checking the results for 200 scholars, I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my invaluable research assistants Greg Fournier, Richard Keck, Annika Hernandez, Anna Low, Christopher Robinson, and Riley Fletcher.