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After being delayed for the second year in a row, U.S. News & World Report rolled out this year's "" rankings with substantial changes.

Notably, the best institutions for research and primary care were sorted into tiers, rather than by ordinal rankings. (The "Best Hospitals" rankings from U.S. News have also moved away from ordinal rankings.)

Last year, a number of top schools publicly announced they would no longer submit data to or participate in the rankings. Harvard Medical School led the way in doing so, and a number of other institutions followed suit.

In another change, medical schools that have opted to no longer submit data to U.S. News went unranked this year.

Explaining this year's methodology, U.S. News noted that there were 102 medical and osteopathic schools with eligible data for its research ratings, and 99 for primary care ratings. "Compared with the previous edition of the rankings, 80% of the top 100 schools in both research and primary care were assessed, while the remaining 20% that declined to participate in the statistical survey were labeled as unranked," the outlet stated.

"Although prospective medical school students would benefit from learning more about these unranked schools, a comparative rating of participating schools is more informative than having no listing at all," the outlet added. "U.S. News strongly believes in improving medical school data transparency, both by encouraging schools to report data to U.S. News as well as making more information publicly available on their websites. Altogether, more data is better for everyone."

As for the removal of ordinal rankings in its research and primary care lists, U.S. News explained that it calculated overall scores for medical schools based on their percentile performance among all rated institutions rather than dividing against the re-scaled score of the No. 1 performing schools.

"This approach was better suited for placing schools into tiers because this ensured the tier cutoffs accounted for how schools performed across the entire universe of schools," the outlet said. "Such a consideration had been moot for ordinal rankings where tier cutoffs did not exist."

Ultimately, Tier 1, the highest performing, included medical schools with overall scores of 85-99, with schools in tiers 2, 3, and 4 scoring 50-84, 15-49, and 1-14, respectively, U.S. News noted. (These ranges are the only scores available for public view, according to the outlet.)

Data sourced via the outlet's surveying of accredited schools -- and sometimes third-party statistics -- were used to calculate tiers, in addition to diversity and practice rankings. Both research and primary care ratings evaluated schools on faculty resources and the academic achievement of incoming students. Research ratings also looked at medical research grants, while primary care factored in graduate placement and practice in the field.

Rankings of medical school specialties, such as surgery and psychiatry, were discontinued because their data collection had been part of peer assessment surveys that are also no longer being used, U.S. News said.

Last month, U.S. News said that the rankings -- first due out in April -- were forthcoming as more changes were underway. Previously, the outlet revealed that the rankings were once again being held back, noting, in part, that during its regular pre-publication process, it had received and was in the process of reviewing queries from a number of graduate schools.

Below are this year's highest performing medical schools in research and primary care, according to U.S. News.

Tier 1 Medical Schools: Research

• Baylor College of Medicine, Houston
• Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland
• Emory University, Atlanta
• Hofstra University/Northwell Health (Zucker), Hempstead, New York
• Mayo Clinic School of Medicine (Alix), Rochester, Minnesota
• Northwestern University (Feinberg), Chicago
• Ohio State University, Columbus
• University of California Los Angeles (Geffen)
• University of California San Diego
• University of California San Francisco
• University of Cincinnati
• University of Colorado, Aurora
• University of Pittsburgh
• University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas
• Vanderbilt University, Nashville
• Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Tier 1 Medical Schools: Primary Care

• East Carolina University (Brody), Greenville, North Carolina
• Saint Louis University, St. Louis
• Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, Lubbock
• University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock
• University of California Davis
• University of California San Francisco
• University of Hawaii - Manoa (Burns), Honolulu
• University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City
• University of Maryland, Baltimore
• University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, Worcester
• University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
• University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha
• University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
• University of North Texas Health Science Center, Fort Worth
• Western University of Health Sciences, Pomona, California

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