sutton092

Times Higher Education (THE) has long suffered from the curse of field-normalised citations which without fail produce interesting (in the Chinese curse sense) results every year. Part of THE's citation problem is the kilo-paper issue, papers mainly in particle physics with hundreds or thousands of authors and hundreds or thousands of citations. The best known case is 'Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in pp Collisions    ...   ' in Physical Review Letters which has 5,154 contributors. If every contributor to such papers is given equal credit for such citations then his or her institution would be awarded thousands of citations. Combined with other attributes of this indicator this means that a succession of improbable places, such as Tokyo Metropolitan University and Middle East Technical University,  have soared to the research impact peaks in the THE world rankings. THE have already tried a couple of variations to counting citations for this sort of p...

Henk F Moed, Sapienza University of Rome A critical comparative analysis of five world university rankings ABSTRACT To provide users insight into the value and limits of world university rankings, a comparative analysis is conducted of 5 ranking systems: ARWU, Leiden, THE, QS and U-Multirank. It links these systems with one another at the level of individual institutions, and analyses the overlap in institutional coverage, geographical coverage, how indicators are calculated from raw data, the skewness of indicator distributions, and statistical correlations between indicators. Four secondary analyses are presented investigating national academic systems and selected pairs of indicators. It is argued that current systems are still one-dimensional in the sense that they provide finalized, seemingly unrelated indicator values rather than offering a data set and tools to observe patterns in multi-faceted data. By systematically comparing different systems, more insight is provided into...

There has been a debate, or perhaps the beginnings of a debate, about international university rankings following the publication of Bahram Bekhradnia's  report  to the Higher Education Policy Institute with comments in  University World News  by  Ben Sowter ,  Phil Baty ,  Frank Ziegele and Frans van Vought     and  Philip Altbach and Ellen Hazelkorn  and a  guest post  by Bekhradnia in this blog. Bekhradnia argued that global university rankings were damaging and dangerous because they encourage an obsession with research, rely on unreliable or subjective data, and emphasise spurious precision. He suggests that governments, universities and academics should just ignore the rankings. Times Higher Education   (THE) has now published   a piece   by THE rankings editor Phil Baty that does not really deal with the criticism but basically says that it does not matter very much because the THE database is bigger ...

Now available at the Asian Journal of University Education . The paper has, of course, already been outdated by subsequent developments in the world of university rankings ABSTRACT This paper analyses the global university rankings introduced by Times Higher Education (THE) in partnership with Thomson Reuters in 2010 after the magazine ended its association with its former data provider Quacquarelli Symonds. The distinctive features of the new rankings included a new procedure for determining the choice and weighting of the various indicators, new criteria for inclusion in and exclusion from the rankings, a revised academic reputation survey, the introduction of an indicator that attempted to measure innovation, the addition of a third measure of internationalization, the use of several indicators related to teaching, the bundling of indicators into groups, and most significantly, the employment of a very distinctive measure of research impact with an unprecedentedly large weighting. T...

It is now difficult to imagine a world without university rankings. If they did not exist we would have to make judgements and decisions based on the self-serving announcements of bureaucrats and politicians, reputations derived from the achievements of past decades and popular and elite prejudices. Rankings sometimes tell us things that are worth hearing. The first edition of the Shanghai rankings revealed emphatically that venerable European universities such as Bologna, the Sorbonne and Heidelberg were lagging behind their Anglo-Saxon competitors. More recently, the rise of research based universities in South Korea and Hong Kong and the relative stagnation of Japan has been documented by global rankings. The Shanghai ARWU also show the steady decline in the relative research capacity of a variety of US institutions including Wake Forest University, Dartmouth College, Wayne State University, the University of Oregon and Washington State University . International university ranking...

One of the strange things among several about the legal challenge to Trump's executive order on refugees and immigration is  the  claim  in an amicus brief by dozens of companies, many of them at the cutting edge of the high tech economy,  that the order makes it hard to "recruit hire and retain some of the world's best employees." The proposed, now frozen, restrictions would, moreover, be a "barrier to innovation" and prevent companies from attracting "great talent." They point out that many Nobel prize winners are immigrants. Note that these are "tech giants", not meat packers or farmers and that they are talking about the great and the best employees, not the good or adequate or possibly employable after a decade of ESL classes and community college. So let us take a look at the seven countries included in the proposed restrictions. Are they likely to be the source of large numbers of future hi tech entrepreneurs, Nobel laureates and ...

I have just received this reply from Bahram Bekhradnia, President of the Higher Education Policy institute, in response to my review of his report on global university rankings. My main two points which I think are not reflected in your blog – no doubt because I was not sufficiently clear – are ·         First the international rankings – with the exception of U-multirank which has other issues – almost  exclusively reflect research activity and performance. Citations and publications of course are explicitly concerned with research, and as you say “International faculty are probably recruited more for their research reputation than for anything else. Income from industry (THE) is of course a measure of reported funding for applied research. The QS academic reputation survey is officially about research and THE 's academic reputation survey of teaching is about postgraduate supervision.”  And I add (see below) that faculty to student r...