Friday, September 08, 2017

Why did Babol Noshirvani University of Technology do so well in the THE rankings?

The THE world rankings and their regional offshoots have always been a source of entertainment mixed with a little bit of bewilderment. Every year a succession of improbable places jumps into the upper reaches of the citations indicator which is supposed to measure global research impact. Usually it is possible to tell what happened  Often it is because of participation in a massive international physics project, although not so much over the last couple of years, contribution to a global medical or genetics survey, or even assiduous self-citation.

However, after checking with Scopus and the Web of Science, I still cannot see exactly how Babol Noshirvani University of Technology got into 14th place for this metric, equal to Oxford and ahead of Yale and Johns Hopkins, in the latest world rankings and 301-350 overall, well ahead of every other Iranian university?

Can anybody help with an explanation? 

6 comments:

Christian Scholz said...

This years Citations Indicator is funny... Sometimes I think THE is using the HCR list for the Indicator. Babol has now two HCRs,... but thats not really the reason for a 99.1 Score.
Still... there is no methodological explanation of the Indicator, right? Or have I missed something?

Unknown said...

Babol is 14th in the world in citations, equal with Oxford!

Anonymous said...

King Abdulaziz University has been constantly outscoring more prestigious universities going unseen...all seems like deja-vu

Anonymous said...

Why not ask Phil Baty?

Anonymous said...

Phil Baty is just referring to the Scopus FWCI indicator. So there must be something about this indicator that gives Babol a high score. FWCI is a field weighted indicator so comparing citations in a like-with-like way (same output type in same period within same discipline). Babol does not have that many citations in 2011-2016 (you can look that up in Scopus) but maybe within the discipline of engineering this is relatively high? Other question: how is THE adding up all the fields for an university wide citation score?

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