The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University has been ranked 18th in the nation among all computer science graduate programs in an article published in the June 2007 issue of the Communications of the ACM. The article, “Automatic and Versatile Publications Ranking for Research Institutions and Scholars,” was written by Jie Ren, a software engineer at Google, and Richard N. Taylor, a professor of information and computer science and director of the Institute for Software Research at the University of California, Irvine. The authors also rank software engineering programs and software engineering scholars world-wide. The Department's software engineering group ranked 21st overall, including 11th among groups at US research universities, and Dr. R. E. Kurt Stirewalt ranked 26th overall among all software engineering scholars.

The methodology used by the authors was based upon research publication data in archival journals and top tier research conferences. To rank entire departments, the authors used publication data from 1995 to 2003. To rank software engineering programs and scholars, the authors used publication data from 2000-2004. Alternative rankings, such as those performed by U.S. News and World Report and the National Research Council, are based on both objective measures (publications, research expenditures, etc.) and subjective polls.

ACM subscribers can find the entire article here .