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Introduction  Despite the wide usage of U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) rankings of ophthalmology hospitals among the public, residency applicants, and ophthalmologists, there is disagreement in the literature on the role of quality of care, research productivity, and other factors in the ranking system. This study investigated the association of U.S. News ranking of ophthalmology hospitals and objective measures of research productivity. Methods  The 2020 U.S. News "Best Hospitals for Ophthalmology" ranking lists 38 hospitals by reputation score and numerically ranks the top 12 institutions. For our analysis, top 12 hospitals were classified as group A and the remaining 26 as group B. The Clinicaltrials.gov, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools Expenditures and Results (RePORTER), and NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORT) were systematically searched for total clinical trials, NIH funding, and the National Eye Institute (NEI) funding for fiscal years 2017, 2018, and 2019. Faculty size and the number of publications by ophthalmology faculty per hospital were recorded from a previous study in 2016. Results  Independent measures of research productivity significantly associated with group A status after multivariate logistic regression analysis were mean faculty Hirsch's index (h-index) over 15 (odds ratio [OR]: 6.13, 95% confidence interval [CI]: [1.14-32.94]) and conducting five or more total clinical trials (OR: 8.77, 95% CI: [1.39-55.16]). Conclusion  This study suggests that the reputation-based U.S. News ranking may serve as a proxy for an ophthalmology department's contribution to research measured by mean faculty h-index and number of clinical trials., Competing Interests: Conflict of Interest None declared., (The Author(s). This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ).)