The unveiling of the National Research Council’s assessments and rankings of American doctoral programs has been pushed back from “late spring” to “early fall,” the project’s director said in an interview this afternoon.

“It’s been a huge effort to clean all of the data, and that has taken longer than we thought,” said Charlotte V. Kuh, the council’s deputy executive director of policy and global affairs.

Once it became apparent that the report could not be polished by June, she added, she and her colleagues decided that it would be best to wait until the fall semester begins. “We really want to release the report at a time when faculty and students are on campus,” she said.

The widely cited rankings, which were last published in 1995, have been through several rounds of delays. (See Chronicle articles in April 2004, December 2004, October 2007, and November 2007.)

The council has substantially changed its assessment methodology since the 1995 report. Ms. Kuh summarized the project in a presentation at the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools last December. —David Glenn