sutton092

I am feeling a bit embarrassed. In a recent post I wrote about the Shanghai Rankings (ARWU) being a bit boring (which is good) because university ranks usually do not change very much. But then I noticed that a couple of Australian universities did very well in the latest rankings . One of them, the Australian National University (ANU), has risen a spectacular (for ARWU) 31 places over last year. The Financial Review   says that "[u]niversity scientific research has boosted the position of two Australian universities in a global ranking of higher education providers."  The ranking is ARWU and the rise in the ranking is linked to the economic contribution of Australian universities, especially those in the Group of Eight. So how well did Australian universities do? The top performer, as in previous years, is the University of Melbourne, which went up a spot to 38th place. T wo other universities went up a lot in a very un-Shanghainese way, ANU, already mentioned, from 69th to ...

A paper by Ludo Waltman and Nees Jan van Eck asks what users of the Leiden Ranking are interested in. There's some interesting stuff but for now I just want to look at where the users come from. The top ten countries where visitors originate are: 1.  USA 2.  Australia 3.  Netherlands 4.  UK 5.  Turkey 6.  Iran 7.  South Korea 8.  France 9.  Germany 10. Denmark. The authors consider the number of visitors from Australia, Turkey, Iran and South Korea to be "quite remarkable." Let's look at other signs of interest in rankings. Here are the top countries for respondents to the 2018 QS academic survey: 1.  USA 2.  UK 3.  Malaysia 4= Australia 4= South Korea 4= Russia 7= Italy 7= Japan 9= Brazil 9= Canada And here are the top ten countries for visitors to this blog: 1. USA 2. UK 3. Russia 4. France 5. Germany 6. Ukraine 7. Canada 8. Malaysia 9. Australia 10. Singapore. The three countries on all three lists are UK, USA and Australi...

International university rankings can be a bit boring sometimes. It is difficult to get excited about the Shanghai rankings, especially at the upper end: Chicago down two places, Peking up one. There was a bit of excitement in 2014 when there was a switch to a new list of highly cited researchers and some universities went up and down a few places, or even a few dozen, but that seems over with now. The Times Higher Education (THE) world rankings are always fun to read, especially the citations indicator, which since 2010 has proclaimed a succession of unlikely places as having an outsize influence on the world of research: Alexandria University, Hong Kong Baptist University,  Bilkent University, Royal Holloway University of London, National Research University MEPhi Moscow, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Federico Santa Maria Technical University Chile, St George's University of London, Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge, Babol Noshirvani University University of Technology Iran. I...