The long wait for the National Research Council’s assessments and rankings of American doctoral programs just got a bit longer.

The council posted a notice on Wednesday indicating that its report — which had been scheduled for a late-September or early-October release — had been postponed again. This is the latest in a long series of calendar shuffles for the assessments, which have not been updated since a 1995 report.

The notice says that the project’s “methodology guide” — a preliminary report that will summarize the statistical techniques used in the new assessments — will be released in late October or early November. But no date has been set for the release of the assessments themselves.

Among the reasons for this year’s delays was a late decision to expand the range of publications that would be included when counting citations of faculty members’ scholarly work. That decision required a time-consuming analysis of a database provided by the Thomson Corporation.

The project’s director, Charlotte V. Kuh, offered a status report on the assessments during a July workshop sponsored by the Council of Graduate Schools. —David Glenn