sutton092

There is a controversy brewing in Hong Kong about the submission of data to the QS World University Rankings. It seems that the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has submitted a smaller figure for the total number of its students than that presented by the SAR's University Grants Committee (UGC). The objective of this was presumably to boost the score for faculty student ratio, which accounts for 20% of the total score in the QS rankings. The complaints apparently began with two other local universities and were reported in the Chinese language Apple Daily . There is nothing new about this sort of thing. Back in 2006 I commented on the difference between the number of students at "Beijing University" on the university web site and that declared by QS. Ong Kian Ming has noted discrepancies  between the number of students at Malaysian universities reported on web sites and that published by QS and there have been questions about the number of international students a...

In response to  suggestion by Hee Kim Poh of Nanyang Technological University, I have had a look at the Worldwide Professional University Rankings which appear to be linked to "Global World Communicator" and the "International Council of Scientists" and may be based in Latvia. There is a methodology page but it does not include essential information. One indicator is "number of publications to number of academic staff" but there is nothing about how either of these are calculated or where the data comes from. There is a reference to a survey of members of the International Council of Scientists but nothing about the wording of the survey, date of survey, distribution of respondents or the response rate. Anyway, here is the introduction to the methodology: "The methodology of the professional ranking of universities is based on comparing universities and professional evaluation by level of proposed training programs (degrees), availability and comple...

The QS BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) university rankings will be announced on November 23 at the QS-APPLE conference in Taiwan.

The website TOP500 keeps track of the world's most powerful computers. Six months ago the USA had 169 supercomputers in the top 500 and China 160. Now China has 202 and the USA 143. They are followed by Japan with 35, Germany 20, France 18 and the UK 15. There are four supercomputers in India, four in the Middle East (all in Saudi Arabia), one in Latin America (Mexico), one in Africa (South Africa), 

According to the Scopus database, China produced 387,475 articles in 2016 and the USA 409,364, a gap of 21,889. To be precise, there were 387,475 articles with at least one author affiliated to a Chinese university or research center and 409,364 with at least one author affiliated to an American university or research center. So far this year there have been 346,425 articles with Chinese affiliations and 352,275 with US affiliations. The gap is now 5,850 articles. I think it safe to say that at some point early next year the gap will close and that China will then pull ahead of the USA. Some caveats. A lot of those articles are just routine stuff and not very significant. For a while, the US may do better in high impact research as measured by citations. Also, US universities contribute more heads of research projects. On the other hand, I suspect that many of the researchers listed as having American affiliations did their undergraduate degrees or secondary education in China. And if ...

A complicated relationship Malaysia has had a complicated relationship with global university rankings. There was a moment back in 2004 when the first Times Higher Education Supplement - Quacquarelli Symonds (THES-QS) world rankings put the country's flagship, Universiti Malaya (UM), in the top 100. That was the result of an error, one of several QS made in its early days. Over the next few years UM has gone down and up in the rankings, but generally trending upwards with other Malaysian universities following behind. This year it is 114th in the QS world rankings and the top 100 seems in sight once again. There has been a lot of debate about the quality of the various ranking systems, but it does seem that UM and some other universities have been steadily improving, especially with regard to research, although, as the recent Universitas 21 report shows, output and quality are still lagging behind the provision of resources.   There is, however, an unfortunate tendency i...

Over on the right there will be a list of events such as conferences, workshops, and announcements of rankings. First is the 7th World-Class Universities Conference in Shanghai starting next Monday, November 6th.

I have been busy with family and work matters recently but I shall resume posting tomorrow. I shall be adding some features that I hope will make the blog more of a useful resource.