University Ranking Watch

2012-01-26T15:56:00.001+08:00

Guest Post

Today's post is by Masturah Alatas. It is in response to a comment in the Kuala Lumpur New Straits Times by James Campbell that begins:

"Any discussion of Malaysian tertiary educational policy needs to take into account the needs of national development in a specific and historical context. Recent debates in regard to the competitive position of Malaysian higher education globally is one area where the pressures of competition and liberalisation must be balanced by the interests of inclusion and social sustainability."

Over the last few years there has been an ongoing debate between those Malaysian academics who accept the challenge of globalisation and those who more concerned with, as Campbell puts it, "ensuring national values, addressing horizontal social inequality, rural disadvantage and looking into the needs of sustainable and inclusive economic and social development".

The comment continued by invoking the name of Syed Hussein Alatas, a Malaysian social and political theorist who had considerable international influence, being cited by, among others, Edward Said.

"The discourse of neo-liberal globalisation is itself still arguably beholden to what Syed Hussein Alatas critiqued as the discourse of “The Lazy Native”. Higher educational institutions’ commitment to inclusion and social justice is central to their merit in society."

The following is a response to this comment by the daughter and biographer of Alatas.

Finding the clarity

by Masturah Alatas

As biographer of late Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas (1928 – 2007), I do not consider his life story to end with the end of his life. Any continuing narrative about Alatas also has to take into account how, for example, he is talked about in the media today.

As a case in point, I refer to the article Finding the Balance (Learning Curve, New Straits Times, 20 November 2011) by Dr James Campbell, a lecturer in Education at Deakin University, Australia, and researcher with Universiti Sains Malaysia.

Even though the article carries a moribund photo of Alatas, it contains only one sentence in direct reference to him. And the sentence is difficult to understand. “The discourse of neo-liberal globalization is itself still arguably beholden to what Syed Hussein Alatas critiques as the discourse of The Lazy Native”.

The article does not explain what, if at all, neo-liberal globalization has to do with “the discourse of The Lazy Native”. And nowhere in the article is it clearly stated that many of Malaysia’s current higher education policies are neo-liberal to begin with. So Campbell is vague. He seems to be criticizing neo-liberalism in general, but not what is specifically neo-liberal about Malaysia’s higher education policies.

Campbell argues that comparisons between the National University of Singapore and Universiti Malaya may not always be valid “given important distinctions and differences in national policies and political culture between the two nations.”

But how does this reasoning square with the fact that a Malaysian sociologist like Syed Hussein Alatas taught at the National University of Singapore for over twenty years, and was appointed Head of Department of Malay studies there? What criteria of merit did NUS apply when they tenured Syed Hussein Alatas? Is Campbell suggesting that the same criteria cannot be applied in a Malaysian university? And if so, why not?

Malaysians may still remember Syed Hussein Alatas’ short-lived, controversial term (1988 – 1991) as Vice-Chancellor of Universiti Malaya when he tried to promote academic staff based on merit. For Alatas, one way to establish merit was to look at the publications of academics. The New Straits Times itself carried reports of the controversy, so it is no secret. Some of them contained statements like “five members of the students association have come out in support of Vice-Chancellor Syed Hussein Alatas’s stand on the appointment of non-Malay deans to faculties in the university” (NST, 12 March 1990).

When Campbell writes that any discussion of Malaysia’s higher education policies “needs to be placed in perspective against the needs of national development in a specific historical context”, and that notions of merit must take into account ideas of inclusion and social justice, what exactly does he mean? Inclusion, of course, necessarily entails exclusion. But who is being excluded and on what grounds are they being excluded? And whose sense of social justice are we talking about here?

Syed Hussein Alatas’ works from The Myth of the Lazy Native to his writings on corruption precisely warn against the dangers of relativising notions of social justice. So it is quite odd that Campbell would refer to Alatas in his article.

All written legacies can be appropriated, rightly and wrongly, to support a particular persuasion or agenda, and it depends on critics to call attention to what is right or wrong appropriation. One of the best writers I know, for example, who has creatively applied Syed Hussein Alatas’ ideas on mental captivity and the inability to raise original problems to the role of education and the Arts, is former New Straits Times columnist U-En Ng. “You can use entertainment to pull wool over people’s eyes and divert attention away from whatever it is you don’t want them to see or think about. Or, more positively, you can use artistic expression to build civic participation and the capacity to raise original problems,” he writes in the article Governing through the Arts (NST, 09 January 2011). “Rebellious performance art by university students tells you both what you can expect from the current education system as well as how the public might react to new ideas.”

At the same time, a young Italian poet from Osimo by the name of Andrea Palazzo reminds us that an excess of “the so-called need to express oneself can be the mortal enemy of Beauty and Truth. Overshadowed by popular opinion, great art dies, or rather it disappears, or languishes in museums.” And for Palazzo, the prospects for Philosophy in some Italian universities, which he feels are “conservative rather than selective”, are not much brighter either.

Syed Hussein Alatas believed that any process of change must necessarily be accompanied by a philosophical set of criteria for selection of what to reject, retain and strive for (see Erring Modernization, 1975). Quoting from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Use and Abuse of History, Alatas stressed the importance of having a horizon of thinking, “a line that divides the visible and the clear from the vague and shadowy” in order for an individual, a community and a nation to thrive. “We must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember, and instinctively see when it is necessary to feel historically and when unhistorically.”

It is, of course, extremely difficult to know when and what to remember and forget, especially when the spectre of Malaysia’s 1969 May 13 Racial Riots still haunts us, and when Malaysia is making itself dizzy by rushing to become a High Income Nation before eight years are up.

But one way for a line, a horizon of thinking, to become clearer is through good writing. And this may just be what will rescue Alatas’ work from languishing in the shadows.

Masturah Alatas

2012-01-23T01:50:00.000+08:00

Worth Reading

Ranking in Higher Education: Its Place and Impact by Jan Sadlak. Originally appeared in the Europa World of Learning 2010.

2012-01-18T23:47:00.000+08:00

The Power of Small Numbers

My attention has just been drawn to the citations per paper indicator in the 2011 QS Asian University Rankings. In first place is University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines, a very good school in some ways but not usually considered as a research rival to Hong Kong or Tokyo. It seems that UST's success was the result of just one much cited medical paper of which just one UST researcher was a co-author.

Another highly cited many-authored medical paper seems to explain Universitas Padjadjaran's appearance in sixth place in this indicator even though the total number of papers is extremely small.

Leiden University have started offering fractional counting of publications in their rankings:

The fractional counting method gives less weight to collaborative publications than to non-collaborative ones. For instance, if the address list of a publication contains five addresses and two of these addresses belong to a particular university, then the publication has a weight of 0.4 in the calculation of the bibliometric indicators for this university. The fractional counting method leads to a more proper normalization of indicators and to fairer comparisons between universities active in different scientific fields. Fractional counting is therefore regarded as the preferred counting method in the Leiden Ranking.

This would be one way of avoiding giving a high position to universities that produce little but manage to get researchers included as co-authors a few papers, usually in medical journals,

2012-01-18T22:59:00.000+08:00

FindThe Best

This is a site that has just come to my attention. There is a great variety of rankings of things like antivirus, snowboards and fertility clinics and also of colleges and universities, including business, law and medical schools.

The colleges and universities ranking is US only and includes a "smart ranking" combining statistical information with the Forbes, US News and ARWU (Shanghai) rankings. This sounds like a good idea but there does not seem to be any information about the methodology.

2012-01-17T09:01:00.000+08:00

The Happiest University in Britain?

According to the Daily Telegraph it's St Mary's University College Belfast. I thought Belfast was in Ireland but then again I did not do geography in secondary school.

2012-01-17T08:55:00.000+08:00

Update: The Journal Bubble

Jeffrey Bealle has a list of predatory journals.

Note that some of the comments dispute the inclusion of some journals.

2012-01-17T08:43:00.002+08:00

The Journal Bubble

Inside Higher Ed has a piece by Philip Altbach about the proliferation of dubious academic journals.

Clever people have figured out that there is a growing demand for outlets for scholarly work, that there are too few journals or other channels to accommodate all the articles written, that new technology has created confusion as well as opportunities, and (finally) and somewhat concerning is that there is money to be made in the knowledge communication business. As a result, there has been a proliferation of new publishers offering new journals in every imaginable field. The established for-profit publishers have also been purchasing journals and creating new ones so that they “bundle” them and offer them at high prices to libraries through electronic subscriptions.

Read it here.

I suspect that this is causing increasing problems for struggling but respectable journals in the academic periphery. I know of of least one journal that has had several submitters "disappear" after being asked to make modest revisions or even deal with problems identified by a turnitin report. One wonders where the papers will reappear.

2012-01-15T21:56:00.000+08:00

Research Fraud in the UK

AN article in Times Higher Education by Jack Grove indicates that there is a large amount of research fraud going on in UK universities, although the comments raise questions about the validity of the study.

I am wondering if there is any comparative international data available.

2012-01-15T21:41:00.000+08:00

Primary School League Tables

The craze for rankings continues unabated. There is now a League Table for English primary schools.

The league tables show the percentage of 11-year-olds in each school reaching Level 4 – the standard expected for their age group – in both English and maths at primary school.
Officially, this means they can spell properly, start to use grammatically complex sentences and employ joined up handwriting in English. In maths, they should be able to multiply and divide whole numbers by 10 or 100 and be able to use simple fractions and percentages.

Pupils exceeding this standard are awarded a higher Level 5.Data for individual schools also shows three other measures: average points score, value-added and pupil progress.

2012-01-14T14:18:00.000+08:00

Who says college isn't worth it?

There is a web site called SeekingArrangement which puts sugar daddies and sugar babies in touch with another. Apparently, large numbers of college graduates are signing up in the latter category, perhaps because of increasing difficulties in paying off student loans.

There is now a ranking of the top 20 colleges among sugar baby sign ups. I have doubts about the validity of the ranking. All that is necessary to be a certified college sugar baby, and get three times as many enquiries from sugar daddies (it's good to know that American society still values education), is an edu email address.

New York University might be number 1 because its tuition fees are so high or job prospects for graduates so meagre or maybe because the sugar daddies are in New York.

Here are the top twenty:

1. New York University (NYU) -- 185
2. University of Georgia -- 155
3. University of Phoenix -- 144
4. Tulane University -- 129
5. Temple University -- 113
6. Virginia Community College -- 108
7. University of Southern Florida -- 93
8. Arizona State University -- 85
9. Michigan State University -- 81
10. Ivy Tech Community College -- 78
11. Georgia State University -- 74
12. University of Wisconsin -- 73
13. Penn State University -- 72
14. University of Central Florida -- 67
15. Kent University -- 65
16. Maricopa Community College -- 63
17. Indiana University -- 62
18. University of California, Berkeley -- 61
19. The Art Institutes -- 60
20. Florida International University -- 59

Please note that I found this story via the Chronicle of Higher Education.

2012-01-14T13:10:00.000+08:00

Online Education Rankings

US News has announced its rankings of American online education programs. There are six categories: Bachelor's, Business, Education, Engineering, Info tech and Nursing. Within each category there are rankings for faculty credentials and training, student services and technology, student engagement and assessment and, except for bachelor's, admissions selectivity. For bachelor programs the top universities are:

Faculty Credentials and Training
Westfield State University, Massachusetts

Student Engagement and Assessment
Bellevue University, Nebraska

Student Services and Technology
Arizona State University, Tempe

2012-01-12T07:00:00.000+08:00

The end of the university as we know it?

MIT has already been putting its course materials online for anyone to access free of charge. Now they are going a step further.

"MIT today announced the launch of an online learning initiative internally called “MITx.” MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses through an online interactive learning platform that will:

organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace

feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication

allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx

operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.
MIT expects that this learning platform will enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. MIT also expects that MITx will eventually host a virtual community of millions of learners around the world.

There are a lot of questions that come to mind. Will students be assessed according to the same standards as conventional MIT students? If someone accumulates sufficient certificates of completion will they be entitled to an MITx degree? What will happen if employers and graduate school start accepting MITx certificates as equivalent to standard academic credentials? If so, will MIT be able to resist the temptation to start charging hefty fees for a certificate.

MIT may, perhaps unwittingly, have started a process that will end with universities becoming something very different.

2012-01-02T17:54:00.000+08:00

How Did I Miss This?

The blog Registrarism has discovered a fascinating article, published in 2002 in Higher Education Quarterly, that compares university league tables (that is British university rankings) with the football (soccer to Americans) league tables.

2011-12-19T07:28:00.000+08:00

Leiden Ranking: Many Ways to Rate Research

My article on the Leiden Rankings in University World News can be found here.

It looks as though a two-tier international university ranking system is emerging.

At the top we have the 'big three', Shanghai's Academic Ranking of World Universities, the QS World University Rankings and, since 2010, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

These receive massive attention from the media, are avidly followed by academics, students and other stakeholders and are often quoted in promotional literature. Graduation from a university included in these has even been proposed as a requirement for immigration.

Then we have the rankings by SCImago and Webometrics, both from Spain, the Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities produced by the Higher education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan, and the Leiden Ranking, published by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University.

These rankings get less publicity but are technically very competent and in some ways more reliable than the better-known rankings.

2011-12-08T00:55:00.000+08:00

Update 6 on El Naschie vs Nature

There have been no reports for several days and the trial is now over. There will be a judgement in January.

2011-12-08T00:40:00.003+08:00

What to do about the research bust

Mark Bauerlein has an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the disparity between the extraordinary effort and intelligence poured into scholarly writing in the humanities and the meager attention such writing receives.

"I devised a study of literary research in four English departments at public universities—the University of Georgia, the University at Buffalo, the University of Vermont, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—collecting data on salaries, books and articles published, and the reception of those works. The findings:

Those universities pay regular English faculty, on average, around $25,000 a year to produce research. According to the faculty handbooks, although universities don't like to set explicit proportions, research counts as at least one-third of professors' duties, and we may calculate one-third of their salaries as research pay. This figure does not include sabbaticals, travel funds, and internal grants, not to mention benefits, making the one-third formula a conservative estimate.

Professors in those departments respond diligently, producing ample numbers of books and articles in recent years. At Georgia, from 2004 to 2009, current faculty members produced 22 authored books, 15 edited books, and 200 research essays. The award of tenure didn't produce any drop-off in publication, either. Senior professors continue their inquiries, making their departments consistently relevant and industrious research centers.
Finally, I calculated the impact of those publications by using Google Scholar and my own review of books published in specific areas to count citations. Here the impressive investment and productivity appear in sobering context. Of 13 research articles published by current SUNY-Buffalo professors in 2004, 11 of them received zero to two citations, one had five, one 12. Of 23 articles by Georgia professors in 2004, 16 received zero to two citations, four of them three to six, one eight, one 11, and one 16. "

Bauerlain suggests that these limited citation counts are telling us something, that talented scholars might find better things to do and that society might direct resources elsewhere.

The QS World University Rankings would apparently agree. Their citations indicator simply counts the total number of citations and divides it by the total number of faculty. This is a very crude measure, especially since it counts the current number of faculty but then counts the citations to articles written over a five year period. Any university seeking a boost in the QS rankings could simply axe a few English, history and philosophy specialists and replace them with oncologists and engineers. True, the world would lose studies about Emily Dickinson's Reluctant Ecology of Place, cited once according to Google Scholar, or Negotiations of Homoerotic Tradition in Paradise Regained, but if this was accompanied by even a small advance in cancer treatment, who would really care? There would be an even better effect on the Shanghai rankings which do not not count publications or citations in the humanities but still include the faculty in their productivity indicator.

But there are those who would argue that while disciplines go about citing differently they must be regarded as being on the same level in all other respects. Thomson Reuters, who collect the data for the Times Higher Education rankings, now normalise their data so that citations in a specific discipline in a specific country in a specific year are benchmarked against the average for that discipline in that country in that year. That would mean that the article by the Buffalo professors with five citations might look quite good.

I have a suggestion for those professors of English and other disciplines which hardly anyone seems to read anymore. Go to some Central Asian or East African republic where the papers in your field get only a few citations: the next article you write with its miserable handful of citations will be well above average for that country and your new university will suddenly perform well in the Times Higher rankings. Just make sure that your employer produces two hundred papers a year altogether.

2011-12-02T09:14:00.000+08:00

European Universities and Rankings

Research Trends, the newsletter from Scopus, reports on a conference of European universities that discussed international rankings. The participants found positive aspects to rankings but also had criticisms:

Going through the comparison of the various methodologies, the report details what is actually measured, how the scores for indicators are measured, and how the final scores are calculated — and therefore what the results actually mean.

The first criticism of university rankings is that they tend to principally measure research activities and not teaching. Moreover, the ‘unintended consequences’ of the rankings are clear, with more and more institutions tending to modify their strategy in order to improve their position in the rankings instead of focusing on their main missions.

For some ranking systems, lack of transparency is a major concern, and the QS World University Ranking in particular was criticized for not being sufficiently transparent.
The report also reveals the subjectivity in the proxies chosen and in the weight attached to each, which leads to composite scores that reflect the ranking provider’s concept of quality (for example, it may be decided that a given indicator may count for 25% or 50% of overall assessment score, yet this choice reflects a subjective assessment of what is important for a high-quality institute). In addition, indicator scores are not absolute but relative measures, which can complicate comparisons of indicator scores. For example, if the indicator is number of students per faculty, what does a score of, say, 23 mean? That there are 23 students per faculty member? Or does it mean that this institute has 23% of the students per faculty compared with institutes with the highest number of students/faculty? Moreover, considering simple counts or relative values is not neutral. As an example, the Academic Ranking of World Universities ranking does not take into consideration the size of the institutions.

I am not sure these criticisms are entirely fair. It seems that the weighting of the various indicators in the Times Higher Education rankings emerged from a lot of to and fro-ing between various stakeholders and advisers. In the end, far too much weighting was given to citations but that is not quite the same as assigning arbitrary or subjective values.

The Shanghai rankings do have an indicator, productivity per capita , that takes faculty size into account although it is only ten per cent of the total ranking. The problem here is that faculty in the humanities are counted but not their publications.

I am not sure why QS is being singled out with regard to transparency. The THE rankings are also, perhaps in a different way, quite opaque. Aggregate scores are given for teaching environment, research and international orientation without indicating the scores that make up these criteria.

So what is to be done?

The EUA report makes several recommendations for ranking-makers, including the need to mention what the ranking is for, and for whom it is intended. Among the suggestions to improve the rankings, the following received the greatest attention from the audience:
Include non-journal publications properly, including books, which are especially important for social sciences and the arts and humanities;
Address language issues (is an abstract available in English, as local language versions are often less visible?);
Include more universities: currently the rankings assess only 1–3% of the 17,000 existing universities worldwide;
Take into consideration the teaching mission with relevant indicators.

The first of these may become feasible now that Thomson Reuters has a book citation index. The second and third are uncontroversial. The fourth is very problematical in many ways.

The missing indicator here is student quality. To be very blunt, universities can educate and instruct students but they can do very little to make them brighter. A big contribution to any university ranking would be a comparison of the relative cognitive ability of its students. That, however, is a goal that requires passing through many minefields.

2011-12-01T23:12:00.000+08:00

Diversity and Rankings

Robert Morse, director of data research at the US News and World Report discusses the question of whether "diversity" should be included in the ranking of American law schools.

"I was one of speakers on the "Closing Plenary: Reforming U.S. News Rankings to Include Diversity" panel, which discussed many of the issues pertaining to whether U.S. News should add a measure of diversity directly into the Best Law Schools rankings. I pointed out that U.S. News believes diversity is important and that is why we all ready publish a separate law school diversity index.

Our current index identifies law schools where law students are most and least likely to encounter classmates from a different racial or ethnic group. However, the current index does not measure how successful each law school is at meeting a diversity goal or benchmark at the school, state, local, or national level. It also gives schools enrolling one ethnic group a low score, though that school's enrolment may match its state's ethnic population or the school may be a Historically Black College or University. It's for these reasons the current index would not be appropriate to add into the rankings".

Diversity here does not mean diversity of ideology, religion, class, politics or nationality. It simply means the numbers of recognised minorities, mainly African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans.

It is interesting to look at the diversity index and to see the likely effect of including diversity in the law school rankings. The most diverse law school is the University of Hawaii. The University of the District of Columbia and Florida International University also get high scores. Low scorers include Harvard, Yale and UCLA.

Somehow, I do not think that an indicator that benefited Florida International University at the expense of Harvard would add to the credibility of these rankings.

Unless it can be demonstrated that there is something magically transforming about the statistical profile of a law school reflecting that of its city, state, or nation or future nation, this proposal does not sound like a very good idea.

2011-12-01T10:24:00.000+08:00

The Utility of Rankings

Another advantage of a good performance in international university rankings is that graduates will be able to get into Russian postgraduate programs (if your university is in a G8 country).

Russia’s education ministry is currently drawing up a list of foreign universities whose qualifications will be recognized.

The list will include only universities located within the G8 countries that enter the top 300 in the Academic Ranking of World Universities or the QS World University Rankings. Officials say there will be around 300 institutions meeting the criteria.

The reform is intended to attract more students to take part in Russian MA and PhD programs.

2011-11-26T22:58:00.005+08:00

Update 5 on El Naschie vs Nature

The BBC has another piece on the Nature case by Pallab Ghosh. It seems that El Naschie is now admitting that his papers were not peer reviewed but argues that this was because he had no peers who could review them:

He said that he would discuss his papers with fellow scientists, and only when he thought that they were of a sufficiently high standard would he publish them. "I am too arrogant and have too much self-respect to allow a bad paper to pass through," he said.

Prof El Naschie called one witness, Prof Otto Rossler - an honorary editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals.

He told the court that there was no-one who could peer review him, referring to Prof El Naschie, because "if you have something new to offer, peer review is dangerous", adding that in such cases "peer review delays progress in science".

Prof El-Naschie asked his witness whether he thought that his (Prof El Naschie) papers were of "poor quality".

Prof Rossler replied: "On the contrary, they were very important and will become more important in the future."

And he added: "You are the most hard-working and diligent scientists I have ever met."

It is a useful to compare Rossler with Neil Turok, Nature's expert witness. Rossler is best known lately for warning that the Large Hadron Collider risked creating black holes that would destroy the world. See El Naschie Watch for this and other information. He is also a self-proclaimed simultaneous submitter, something that for journal editors is almost as bad as plagiarism. A comment on Rossler's claims concludes "To conclude: this text would not pass the referee process in a serious journal".

It seems that it is increasingly difficult to argue that Alexandria University's remarkable scores for research impact in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings were the result of outstanding, excellent or even controversial research.

I am not sure what an honorary editor is but at the moment Rossler is not listed as any sort of editor at the official Chaos Solitons and Fractals home page.

Incidentally, since the trial will presumably turn to the question of El Naschie's affiliations at some point, this page lists him as Founding Editor but does not give any affiliation.

2011-11-26T17:42:00.000+08:00

The Politics of Ranking

One of the more interesting aspects of the university ranking business is the way it is used by local politicians to advance their agenda. This is especially obvious in Malaysia where errors and methodological changes have sent local universities bouncing up down the QS rankings. Every rise is proclaimed to be a vindication of government policy while every fall is accompanied by head shaking from the opposition.

This year Universiti Malaya moved into the QS top 200. There is nothing surprising about that: it has been there before. More significant was getting into the Shanghai Academic ranking of World Universities top 500. That is a lot harder but also more likely to reflect real underlying changes. It seems that UM has finally realised that a little bit of encouragement and financial support can produce quite significant results in a short period time.

Patrick Lee, in the blog of opposition leader Lee Kit Siang, comments that:

PETALING JAYA: Malaysia has little to show for its universities despite spending more money on tertiary education than do many other countries.
Malaysian universities lag behind many counterparts in Asia, including those located in neighbouring countries like Thailand and Singapore, according to a World Bank report released today.
“While Malaysia spends slightly more than most countries on its university students, leading Malaysian universities perform relatively poorly in global rankings,” said the report, entitled Malaysia Economic Monitor: Smart Cities.
Citing the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings 2010, it noted that Universiti Malaya (UM) was ranked 207th worldwide and 29th in Asia.
It also quoted a US News and World 2011 report on the World’s Best Universities, which put UM, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Universiti Sains Malaysia and Universiti Putra Malaysia at 167th, 279th, 335th and 358th place respectively.
Even more worrying, the World Bank report observed, was the “increasing gap” between Malaysia’s and Singapore’s universities.
It compared UM with the National University of Singapore (NUS), which QS cited as the leading university in Southeast Asia.
“The gap between UM and NUS has been high and generally increasing, especially in the sciences,” the report said.
According to the report, UM and NUS were on par when it came to science and technology in 2005. However, UM has lost out to NUS over the past six years.
The report also said many of Malaysia’s university graduates did not seem to have the skills that would help them get employment.

Firstly, the QS and the US News and World Report rankings are the same. Secondly, it is a lot easier to start a university in Malaysia than in Singapore.

Even so, moving into the Shanghai rankings is a real advance and should be recognised as such.

2011-11-26T17:22:00.001+08:00

Update 4 on El Naschie vs Nature

Gervase de Wilde has an article on the case in Inform's Blog. He refers to the Guardian's account and then adds the following comment:

Comment
The case seems to offer ammunition to libel reformers. Even in the absence of the ill-advised and incoherent aspects of his case which were excluded before trial, and of the implicit comparisons of his work to Einstein’s made during the first five days at the High Court, his claim against a venerable and highly respected scientific journal seems a poor substitute for meeting their allegations head on in some form of correspondence or public debate. Moreover, the journal had published the Claimant’s own defence of his methods in running CSF, that he sought to emphasise scientific content above impressive affiliations, in the original article.

A spokesperson for the Libel Reform campaign, speaking to the Guardian, commented that reform can’t come soon enough, since
“Scientists expect publications like Nature to investigate and write about controversies within the scientific community. The threat of libel action is preventing scientific journals from discussing what is good and bad science.”

However, the public interest defence argued for by campaigners is one which is already being employed. The BBC reports that Andrew Caldecott QC’s opening statement for the Defendants described their defence as relying on the article being “true, honest opinion and responsible journalism on an issue of public interest”.

As the choice of witnesses indicates, the case does touch on the seemingly incomprehensible branch of physics in which the Claimant has made his academic career. In this respect there is a threat of a libel action stifling academic debate, and a similarity to BCA v Singh 2010 EWCA Civ 350, where opinions expressed in a controversy on what was essentially a scientific matter were at issue. But it is also about the methods he employed in running a publication in the context of a widely recognised system of accreditation and review, and about allegations regarding the professional affiliations which feature on his website. These are the kind of criticisms that might be made about any professional person, and would not necessarily come under scope of a scientific exception for “rigorous debate” on good and bad science urged by campaigners.

It is questionable whether the phrase "academic career" is appropriate since El Naschie has not apparently held any formal permanent academic posts recently unless one counts the award of an Emeritus Professorship by Alexandria University, a strange distinction since there is no sign of the professorship from which he retired.

2011-11-19T07:09:00.000+08:00

Update 3 on El Naschie vs Nature

The Guardian has a substantial report on the case by Alo Jha. It seems that El Naschie believes that expert witness Neil Turok is unqualified to understand his work.It is difficult to see how this argument, even if valid, is relevant to the point of whether or not peer review took place.

Should the court decide in favour of El Naschie, it would provide some sort of justification for the methods used in the citations indicator in the Times Higher Education rankings which gave high scores to Alexandria University mainly or partly because of the many citations of papers by El Naschie.

El Naschie is suing Nature as a result of a news article published in 2008, after the scientist's retirement as editor-in-chief of the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. The article alleged that El Naschie had self-published several research papers, some of which did not seem to have been peer reviewed to an expected standard and also said that El Naschie claimed affiliations and honorary professorships with international institutions that could not be confirmed by Nature. El Naschie claims the allegations in the article were false and had damaged his reputation.

On Friday, Nature called Professor Neil Turok, a cosmologist and director of the Perimeter Institute in Canada, as an expert witness to assess some of the work published by El Naschie.

Turok described his expertise as being in cosmology. "I work at the theoretical end of cosmology … my work consists of applying unified theories, such as string theory, to the most difficult questions in cosmology, namely the beginning of the universe or the initial singularity, the moment where everything was at a single point in the conventional description."

In his evidence, Turok said he found it difficult to understand the logic in some of El Naschie's papers. The clear presentation of scientific ideas was an important step in getting an idea accepted, he said. "There are two questions – one is whether the work is clearly presented and readers would be able to understand it. It would be difficult for a trained theoretical physicist to understand [some of El Naschie's papers]. I couldn't understand it and I made a serious attempt to understand it. The second question is about the correctness of the theory and that will be decided by whether it agrees with experiments. Most theories in theoretical physics are speculative – we form a logical set of rules and deductions and we try, ultimately, to test the deductions in experiments. For me, clear presentation is the first thing in the presentation of a theory."

In response, El Naschie pointed out that even Albert Einstein had made mistakes in his publications. "Einstein is the most sloppy scientist ever. He never defined his quantities, he doesn't put in references and he made so many mistakes of mathematics and concepts. He was a very natural man when he explained something to lay people. But Einstein, whom I admire very much because he had imagination and the courage to stand up to the bloody Nazis, Einstein was an extremely sloppy man."

Later in the session, El Naschie accused Turok of having "no idea" about mathematics and being unqualified to assess his work. "If somebody doesn't understand things, it's his own limitation," El Naschie said.

2011-11-18T05:21:00.000+08:00

Times Higher Social Science Rankings

The top three are:

1. Stanford
2. Harvard
3. Oxford

2011-11-18T05:12:00.000+08:00

The Influence of Rankings

Varsity, the student newspaper at Cambridge, suggests that British universities are recruiting staff in order to improve their position in the QS rankings:

Matthew Knight, chairman of Universities HR and the University of Leeds HR director, said: “Within the context of £9,000 fees, many universities have a strategic drive to improve the quality of the student experience.

“Therefore, many are taking the opportunity to improve student staff ratios regardless of the numbers of applicants. So there’s a lot of recruitment going on at some universities, although there’s no specific pattern to this.”

As the QS World University Rankings use student-faculty ratios as the only globally comparable indicator to determine their tables, an increase in employment can be used to promote a university’s image and attract students.

2011-11-17T04:18:00.000+08:00

Update 2 on El Naschie and Nature

Note that New Scientist describes El Naschie as an "independent physicist". Does this imply that he has no affiliation and that Nature was correct in questioning his claims to academic status?

2011-11-17T04:10:00.000+08:00

Update on El Naschie and Nature

The New Scientist has provided some coverage of the trial which is also discussed at El Naschie Watch. On November 15, this item by Chelsea Whyte appeared:

Benjamin De Lacy Costello, a materials scientist at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK, testified yesterday that when El Naschie was editor, the peer-review process at Chaos, Solitons and Fractals was "frustrating" and unlike that of other journals.

With regard to the dispute over El Naschie's affiliations, Timothy John Pedley, former head of the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge, said that El Naschie was a visiting scholar with access to libraries and collaborations at the department, but was not an honorary scholar working with the privileges of a professor.

On November 16 this update appeared:

Update: Mohamed El Naschie, a former editor of the scientific journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, appeared in London's High Court today for the libel lawsuit he has brought against the scientific journal Nature.

El Naschie is representing himself.
During El Naschie's cross-examination of journalist Quirin Schiermeier, who wrote the 2008 article about him, Schiermeier stood by the content of the work, saying, "We wrote the article because you published 58 papers in one year in a journal where you acted as editor-in-chief. That is unusual and potentially unethical."

El Naschie responded that he felt it wasn't unheard of for journals to publish work that isn't peer-reviewed. He also said that his work had been stolen. "We published my work to secure it," he told the court. "Senior people are above this childish, vain practice of peer review."

I am not an expert, but it seems that El Naschie does not appear to dispute any longer that his pattern of self-publication was unusual or that there had been little or no peer review. He is simply claiming that publication was necessary to preempt the theft of his work by rivals and that the absence of peer review was excused by his seniority. Whether that is inconsistent with Nature's comments is, I assume, a matter for the judge to decide.

2011-11-17T03:43:00.001+08:00

El Naschie and Nature

The El Naschie vs Nature case is under way at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

Briefly, Mohamed El Naschie, the former editor of the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, is suing the journal Nature and the writer Quirin Schiermeier for its comments on the journal's publication of many of his own papers.

El Naschie is claiming that he was defamed by the suggestion that his papers were of poor quality and were published without a normal peer review process. He also claims that he had been defamed by the imputation that he had claimed academic affiliations to which he was not entitled.

The case is of vital importance to academic freedom since if successful it would mean that wealthy persons could stifle even the most balanced and temperate comments on scientific and scholarly activities.

It is also of importance to the question of international university ranking since El Naschie's unusual self-publication and self-citation within a short period of time in a field where citations are low allowed Alexandria University to achieve an extraordinarily high score in the 2010 Times Higher Education World University Rankings. Even this year, the university had a n unreasonably high score in the ranking's research impact indicator. If El Naschie were successful in his claim then Times Higher and Thomson Reuters, who collected and analysed the data for the rankings, would be able to argue that they had uncovered a small pocket of excellence.

The case has been covered extensively in El Naschie Watch and has been discussed in the scientific press.

Updates will be provided from time to time.

2011-11-16T07:39:00.000+08:00

The THE Subject Rankings

The ranking seasons has drawn to a close, or at least it will when we have digested the feasibility report from the European Commission's U-Multirank project. Meanwhile, to tie up some loose ends, here are the top 3 from each of THE's subject group rankings.

Engineering and Technology

1. Caltech
2. MIT
3. Princeton

Arts and Humanities

1. Stanford
2. Harvard
3. Chicago

Clinical, Pre-Clinical and Health

1. Oxford
2. Harvard
3. Imperial College London

Life Sciences

1. Harvard
2. MIT
3. Cambridge

Physical Sciences

1. Caltech
2. Princeton
3. UC Berkeley

Social Sciences

To be posted on the 17th of November.

2011-11-07T21:18:00.000+08:00

Conference in Shanghai

I hope to post something in a day or two on the recent World Class Universities conference in Shanghai. Meanwhile, there is an interesting comment by Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a Canadian consulting firm.

"In discussions like this the subject of rankings is never far away, all the more so at this meeting because its convenor, Professor Nian Cai Liu, is also the originator of the Academic Ranking of World Universities, also known as the Shanghai Rankings. This is one of three main competing world rankings in education, the others being the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) and the QS World Rankings.

The THES and QS rankings are both commercially-driven exercises. QS actually used to do rankings for THES, but the two parted ways a couple of years ago when QS’s commercialism was seen to have gotten a little out of hand. After the split, THES got a little ostentatious about wanting to come up with a “new way” of doing rankings, but in reality, the two aren’t that different: they both rely to a considerable degree on institutions submitting unverified data and on surveys of “expert” opinion. Shanghai, on the other hand, eschews surveys and unverified data, and instead relies entirely on third-party data (mostly bibliometrics).

In terms of reliability, there’s really no comparison. If you look at the correlation between the indicators used in each of the rankings, THES and QS are very weak (meaning that the final results are highly sensitive to the weightings), while the Shanghai rankings are very strong (meaning their results are more robust). What that means is that, while the Shanghai rankings are an excellent rule-of-thumb indicator of concentrations of scientific talent around the world, the QS and THES rankings in many respects are simply measuring reputation.

(I could be a bit harsher here, but since QS are known to threaten academic commentators with lawsuits, I’ll be circumspect.)

Oddly, QS and THES get a lot more attention in the Canadian press than do the Shanghai rankings. I’m not sure whether this is because of a lingering anglophilia or because we do slightly better in those rankings (McGill, improbably, ranks in the THES’s top 20). Either way, it’s a shame, because the Shanghai rankings are a much better gauge of comparative research output, and with its more catholic inclusion policy (500 institutions ranked compared to the THES’s 200), it allows more institutions to compare themselves to the best in the world – at least as far as research is concerned. "

Some technical points. First, Times Higher Education Supplement changed its name to Times Higher Education when it converted to a magazine format in 2008.

Second, the Shanghai rankings are not entirely free from commercial pressures themselves although that has probably had the laudable effect of maintaining a stable methodology since 2003.

Third, both THE and QS accept data from institutions but both claim to have procedures to validate them. Also, the Shanghai rankings do include data from government agencies in their productivity per capita criterion and in some places that might not be any more valid than data from universities.

Fourth, until recently there has been a significant difference in the expert opinion used by THE and by QS. Most of QS's survey respondents were drawn from the mailing lists of the Singapore- and London- based academic publishers, World Scientific, while THE's are drawn from those who have published papers in the ISI indexes. All other things being equal, we would expect THE's respondents to be more expert. This year the difference has been reduced somewhat as QS are getting most of their experts from the Mardev lists supplemented by a sign up facility.

Fifth, although THE publish a list of 200 universities in print and on their site, there is a fairly easily downloadable iphone app available that lists 400 universities.

The most important point though is the question of consistency. It is quite true that the various indicators in the Shanghai rankings correlate quite closely or very closely with one another (.46 to .90 in 2011 according to a conference paper by Ying Chen and Yan Wu of the Shanghai Center for World- Class Universities) while some of those in the QS and THE rankings have little or no relation to one another. However, it could be argued that if two indicators show a high correlation with one another then they are to some extent measuring the same thing and one of them is redundant. Still, that is probably better than indicators which statistically have little to do with one another.

What is more important perhaps is the consistency from one year to another. The main virtue of the Shanghai rankings is that changes in position can be assumed to reflect actual real world changes whereas those in the THE and QS rankings could easily be the result of methodological changes or, in the case of THE, omissions or inclusions.

2011-10-28T23:37:00.000+08:00

An Error

This replaces an earlier post.

Last year Times Higher Education admitted to an error involving Monash University and the University of Adelaide

Also, after the launch of the World University Rankings 2010 it became apparent that, owing to a data processing error, the ranking positions of two Australian universities in the top 200 list were incorrect — the University of Adelaide and Monash University.

Both universities remain in the top 1 per cent of world universities.

This year, a representative of Adelaide commented on the error:

Adelaide's DVCR Mike Brooks said it had been "disconcerting'' that there had been a data processing error last year in the first iteration of the revised rankings since their split from QS. "It certainly raises further questions about the credibility of the rankings,'' Professor Brooks said.

"Based on our own analysis we believe that we have a similar ranking this year to that of 2010. The shift in position is attributed to the error in the processing last year, ongoing changes in THE methodology and increased competition.''

"I think the students and the wider community are able to judge for themselves. As South Australia's leading research-university and only member of the Group of Eight, I know that we are in an incredibly strong position for the future.''

Adelaide's fall seems to have been due very largely to a massive fall in the score for research impact. How much of this was due to the correction of the 2010 error, how much to changes in methodology and how much to the inherent instability of the normalisation procedure is not clear

2011-10-17T08:27:00.001+08:00

GLOBAL: Despite ranking changes, questions persist

My article on the Times Higher Education World University Rankings can be accessed at University World News

The international university ranking scene is starting to look like the heavyweight boxing division. Titles are proliferating and there is no longer an undisputed champion of the world. Caltech has just been crowned top university by Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuters, their data collectors and analysts, while QS have put Cambridge in first place. Over at Webometrics, MIT holds the number one spot. But Harvard has the consolation of remaining the top university in the Scimago and HEEACT rankings as well as the Academic Ranking of World Universities, ARWU, published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Read here

2011-10-09T22:27:00.001+08:00

Rising Stars of the THE - TR Rankings

These are some of the universities that have risen significantly in the rankings compared to last year.

Europe

Karolinska Institute
Munich
LSE
Zurich
Leuven
Wageningen
Leiden
Uppsala
Sheffield
Humboldt

USA

UC Davis
Minnesota
PennState
Michigan State

Australia

Monash

Asia

Osaka
Tohoku

2011-10-09T22:09:00.001+08:00

Caltech in First Place

The big news of the 2011 THE - TR rankings is that Caltech has replaced Harvard as the world's top university. So how exactly did they do it?

According to the Times Higher iPad apps for this year and last (easily downloadable from the rankings page), Harvard's total score fell from 96.1 to 93.9 and Caltech's from 96.0 to 94.8, turning a 0.1 Harvard lead into one of 0.9 for Caltech.

Harvard continued to do better than Caltech in two indicators, with 95 .8 for teaching and 67.5 for international orientation compared to 95.7 and 56.0 for Caltech.

Caltech is much better than Harvard in industry income - innovation but that indicator has a weighting of only 2.5 %.

Harvard's slight lead in the research indicator has turned into a slight lead of 0.8 for Caltech.

Caltech is still ahead for citations but Harvard caught up a bit, narrowing the lead to 0.1.

So, it seems that what made the difference was the research indicator. it seems unlikely that Caltech could overcome Harvard's massive lead in reputation for research and postgraduate teaching: last year it was 100 compared with 23.5. That leaves us with research income per faculty.

According to Phil Baty :

"Harvard reported funding increases that are similar in proportion to those of many other universities, whereas Caltech reported a steep rise (16 per cent) in research funding and an increase in totalinstitutional income."

This seems generally compatible with Caltech's 2008-2009 financial statement according to which:

Before accounting for investment losses, total unrestricted revenues increased 6.7% including JPL, and 14.0% excluding JPL

and

Research awards in FY 2009 reached an all-time high of $357 million, including $29 million of funds secured from the federal stimulus package. Awards from federal sponsors increased by 34.4%, while awards from nonfederal sponsors increased by 20.7%. We also had a good year in terms of private giving, as donors continue to recognize the importance of the research and educational efforts of our outstanding faculty and students.

It seems that research income is going to be the tie-breaker at the top of the THE - TR rankings. This might not be such a good thing. Income is an input. It is not a product, although universities everywhere apparently think so. There are negative backwash effects coming if academics devote their energies to securing grants rather than actually doing research.

2011-10-09T19:42:00.000+08:00

Update on Alexandria

Elnaschiewatch reports that Hend Hanafi, President of Alexandria University, has resigned following prolonged student protests.

Apparently she was under fire because of her links to the old regime but one wonders whether her university's apparent fall of nearly 200 places in the THE - TR rankings gave her a final push. If so, we hope that Times Higher will send a letter of apology for unrealistically raising the hopes of faculty and students.

2011-10-09T19:27:00.004+08:00

Meanwhile over in Alexandria
One of the strangest results of the 2010 THE - TR rankings was the elevation of Alexandria University in Egypt to the improbable status of fourth best university in the world for research impact and 147th overall. It turned out that this was almost entirely the work of precisely one marginal academic figure, Mohamed El Naschie, former editor of the journal Chaos Solitons and Fractals, whose worked was copiously cited by himself, other authors in his journal and those in an Israeli - published journal (now purchased by De Gruyter) of which he was an editor.

The number of citations collected by El Naschie was not outrageously high but it was much higher than usual for his discipline and many of them were within a year of publication. This meant that El Naschie and Alexandria University received massive credit for his citations since Thomson Reuters' normalisation system meant comparison with the international average in a field where citations are low especially in the first year of publication.

Alexandria was not the only university to receive an obviously inflated score for research impact. Hong Kong Baptist University received a score of 97.6 and Bilkent one of 95.7, although in those two cases it seems that the few papers that contributed to these scores did have genuine merit.

It should be remembered that the citation scores were averages and that a few highly cited papers could have a grossly disproportionate effect if the total number of published papers was low.

This year Thomson Reuters went to some length to reduce the impact of a few highly cited papers. They have to some extent succeeded. Alexandria's score is down to 61.4 for citations (it is in 330th place overall), Bilkent's to 60.8 (222nd place overall) and HKBU's to 59.7 (290th place overall).

These scores are not as ridiculous as those of 2010 but they are still unreasonable. Are we really expected to believe that these schools have a greater research impact than the University of Sydney, Kyoto University, the London School of Economics, Monash University and Peking University who all have scores in the fifties for this indicator?

I for one cannot believe that a single paper or a few papers, no matter how worthwhile, can justify inclusion in the top 300 world universities.

There is another problem. Normalisation of citations by year is inherently unstable. One or two papers in a low citation discipline cited within a year of publication will give a boost to the citations indicator score but after a year their impact diminishes because the citations are now coming more than a year after publication.

Alexandria's score was due to fall anyway because El Naschie has published vary little lately so his contribution to the citations score has fallen whatever methodological changes were introduced. And if he ever starts publishing again?

Also, if Thomson Reuters are normalising by field across the board, this rises the possibility that universities will be able to benefit by simply reclassifying research grants, moving research centres fromone field to another, manipulating abstracts and key words and so on.

2011-10-07T14:53:00.000+08:00

Who else is down ?

Just looking at the top 200 of the THE rankings, these universities have fallen quite a bit.

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Sydney
Ecole Normale Superieure
Ecole Polytechnique
Trinity College Dublin
University College Dublin
William and Mary College
University of Virginia

2011-10-07T14:45:00.001+08:00

Asian Decline?

The Shanghai rankings have shown that universities in Korea, China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong) and the Middle East have been steadily advancing over the years. Did they get it wrong?

The latest Times Higher Education -Thomson Reuters rankings appear to prove that Asian universities have inexplicably collapsed over the last year. Tokyo has dropped from 26th to 30th place. Peking has fallen twelve places to 49th. Pohang University of Science and Technology and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have slipped out of the top fifty. Bilkent and Hong Kong Baptist University are way down.The decline of China University of Science and Technology is disastrous, from 49th to 192nd. Asian universities are going to be dangerous places for the next few days with students and teachers dodging university administrators jumping out of office windows.

Of course, massive declines like this do not reflect reality: they are simply the result of the methodological changes introduced this year.

Anyone accessing a ranking site or downloading an iPad app should be made to click on a box reading "I understand that the methodological changes in the rankings mean that comparison with last year's ranking is pointless and I promise not to issue a public statement or say anything to anyone until I have had a cup of tea and I have made sure that everybody else understands this."

2011-10-06T23:34:00.000+08:00

New Arrivals in the THE Top 200.

Every time a new ranking is published there are cries for the dismissal or worse of vice-chancellors or presidents who allowed their universities to lose ground. There will no doubt be more demands as the results of this year's THE rankings are digested. This will be very unjust since there are reasons why universities might take a tumble that have nothing to do with any decline in quality.

First, Thomas Reuters, THE's data collectors, have introduced several methodological changes. In the top 20 or 30 these might not mean very much but lower down the effect could be very large.

Second, rankers sometimes make mistakes and so do those who collect data for institutions.

Third, many new universities have taken part this year. I counted thirteen just in the top 200 and there are certainly many more in the 200s and300s. A university ranked 200 last year would lose 13 places even if it had exactly the same relative score.

The thirteen newcomers are Texas at Austin, Rochester, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of Florida, Brandeis, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Nijmegan, Medical University of South Carolina, Louvain, Universite Paris Diderot vii, Queen's University, Canada, Sao Paulo, Western Australia.

2011-10-06T08:08:00.000+08:00

Highlights of the THE rankings

Some interesting results.

57. Ohio State University
103. Cape Town
107 Royal Holloway
149. Birkbeck
184. Iowa State
197. Georgia Health Sciences University
201-225. Bilkent
201-225 University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey
226-250 Creighton University USA
226-250 Tokyo Metropolitan
251-275 Wayne State
276-300 University of Crete
276-300 University of Iceland
276-300 Istanbul Technical University
276-300 Queensland University of Technology
276-300 Tokyo Medical and Dental University
301-350 Alexandria
301-350 Aveiro University
301-350 Hertfordshire
301-350 Plymouth University, UK
301-350 Sharif University of Technology
301-350 National University of Ireland, Maynooth
301-350 Taiwan Ocean University
301-350 Old Dominion University, USA

2011-10-06T07:40:00.000+08:00

THE Rankings Out

The THE 2011-12 rankings are out.

Here is the top 10.

1. Caltech
2. Harvard
3. Stanford
4. Oxford
5. Princeton
6. Cambridge
7. MIT
8. Imperial College London
9. Chicago
10. Berkeley

2011-10-06T06:34:00.000+08:00

THE Rankings: Caltech Ousts Harvard

This is from the Peninsula in Qatar

LONDON: US and British institutions once again dominate an annual worldwide league table of universities published yesterday, but there is a fresh name at the top, unseating long-time leader Harvard.
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) knocked the famous Massachusetts institution from the summit of the Times Higher Education (THE) league table for the first time in eight years, with US schools claiming 75 of the top 200 places.
Next is Britain, which boasts 32 establishments in the top 200, but an overhaul in the way in which the country’s universities are funded has raised concerns over its continuing success.
Asia’s increasing presence in the annual table has stalled, with 30th placed University of Tokyo leading the continent’s representation.
China’s top two universities hold on to their elite status, but no more institutions from the developing powerhouse managed to break into the top 200.
THE attributed Caltech’s success to “consistent results across the indicators and a steep rise in research funding”.

2011-10-06T06:28:00.000+08:00

THE Rankings

Caffeineblogging

The Guardian appears to have heard something.

On Thursday, the Times Higher Education its global universities rankings. As usual, UK universities shine disproportionately. Altogether a dozen are in the top 100 in the world, with seven in the top 50.

2011-10-05T07:41:00.000+08:00

Latin American Rankings

QS have produced their new Latin American rankings. The Top five are:

1. Universidade de Sao Paulo
2. Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
3. Unidersidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil
4. Universidad de Chile
5. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM)

2011-10-05T07:19:00.001+08:00

Suggestion

In Times Higher Education, Terrance Karran claims that universities that do well in the THE rankings (and the other ones?) are those that show more regard for academic freedom, which is equated to "compliance" with the AAUP's academic freedom statement.

Perhaps an annual prize could be awarded to the university that has the most academic freedom. I propose that it be called the Lawrence Summers Prize

2011-10-05T06:52:00.000+08:00

Expectation

David Willetts, the Brish minister for universities and science says that he expects that more British universities will be in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings top 200.

And if more British universities, then fewer........?

2011-10-04T12:50:00.001+08:00

The US News rankings

The U.S. News rankings of American colleges and universities were released on September 13th. For more information go here.

The top 10 national unuiversities are:

1. Harvard
2. Princeton
3. Yale
4. Columbia
5 = Caltech
5 = MIT
5= Stanford
5= Chicago
5= University of Pennsylvania
10. Duke

2011-09-14T01:44:00.000+08:00

Announcement from THE

Times Higher Education have just announced that they will only rank 200 universities this year. Another 200 will be listed alphabetically but not ranked.

Let us be clear: the Times Higher Education World University Rankings list only the world’s top 200 research-led global universities.

We stop our annual list at the 200th place for two reasons. First, it helps us to make sure that we compare like with like. Although those ranked have different histories, cultures, structures and sizes, they all share some common characteristics: they recruit from the same global pool of students and staff; they push the boundaries of knowledge with research published in the world’s leading journals; and they teach at both the undergraduate and doctoral level in a research-led environment.

We unashamedly rank only around 1 per cent of the world’s universities – all of a similar type – because we recognise that the sector’s diversity is one of its great strengths, and not every university should aspire to be one of the global research elite.

But we also stop the ranking list at 200 in the interests of fairness. It is clear that the lower down the tables you go, the more the data bunch up and the less meaningful the differentials between institutions become. The difference between the institutions in the 10th and 20th places, for example, is much greater than the difference between number 310 and number 320. In fact, ranking differentials at this level become almost meaningless, which is why we limit it to 200.

If THE are going to provide sufficient detail about the component indicators to enable analysts to work out how universities compare with each other this would be be a good idea. It would avoid raucous demands that university heads resign whenever the top national university slips 20 places in the rankings but would allow analysts to figure out exactly where schools were standing.

It is true, as Phil Baty says, that there is not much difference between being 310 and 320 but there is, or there would be if the methodology was valid, a difference between 310 and 210. If THE are just going to present us with a list of 200 universities that did not (quite?) make it into the top 200 a lot of usable information will be lost.

The argument that THE is interested only in the ranking of the leading research led institutions seems to run counter to THE's emphasis on its bundle of teaching indicators and the claim that normalization of citations data can uncover hidden pockets of excellence. If we are concerned only with universities with a research led environment then a few pockets or even a single pocket should be of little concern.

One also wonders what would happen if disgruntled universities decided that it was not worth the effort of collecting masses of data for TR and THE if the only reward is to be lumped among 200 also rans.

2011-09-13T22:14:00.000+08:00

700 Universities

QS have released a ranked list of 700 universities. See here.

2011-09-11T01:12:00.000+08:00

QS: The Employer Survey

The employer survey indicator in the QS World University Rankings might be regarded as a valuable assessment tool since it provides an external check on university quality. There are, however, some odd things about this indicator in the 2011 QS Rankings.

Thirteen universities are given scores of 100, of which 10 are listed as in 4th= place, presumably meaning that they had scores that were identical down to the first or second decimal point. Then 15 schools are listed as being in 15th place with a score of 90, 48 in 51st place with a score of 59.4 and 52 in 100th= place with a score of 55.9.

This is probably something to do with a massive upsurge in responses from Latin America, although exactly what is not clear. QS report that:

"QS received a dramatic level of response from Latin America in 2011, these counts and all subsequent analysis have been adjusted by applying a weighting to responses from countries with a distinctly disproportionate level of response."

2011-09-11T00:42:00.003+08:00

Baloney

The economist David Blanchflower has dismissed the QS rankings as "a load of old baloney".

Much of what he says is sensible, indeed obvious. But not entirely.

"This ranking is complete rubbish and nobody should place any credence in it."

A bit too strong. The QS rankings are not too bad in parts, having improved over the last few years, and are moderately accurate about sorting out universities within a country or region. I doubt that anyone seriously thinks that Cambridge is the best university in the world unless we start counting May balls and punting on the Cam but it is quite reasonable that it is better than Oxford or Durham. Similarly, I wonder if anyone could argue that it is rubbish that Tokyo is the best university in Japan or Cape Town in Africa.

"It is unclear whether having more foreign students and faculty should even have a positive rank; less is probably better."

Students yes, but if nothing else more international faculty does mean that a university is recruiting from a larger pool of talent.

Blanchflower does not mention the academic and employer surveys both of which are flawed but do provide another dimension of assessment or the faculty student ratio which is very crude but might have a slightly closer relationship to teaching quality than the number of alumni who received Nobel prizes decades ago.

He then goes on to compare the QS rankings unfavorably with the Shanghai rankings (That actually is Shanghai Jiao Tong University not what he calls the University of Shanghai). I would certainly agree with most of what he says here but I think that we should remember that flawed as they are the QS rankings do, unlike the Shanghai index, give some recognition to excellence in the arts and humanities, make some attempt to assess teaching and provide a basis for discriminating among those universities without Nobel prize winners or Fields medalists.

Finally, I would love to see if Blanchflower has any comments on last year's THE-Thomson Reuters rankings which put Alexandria, Bilkent and Hong Kong Baptist University among the world's research superpowers.

2011-09-09T09:56:00.001+08:00

Well Done, QS

QS have just indicated that they have excluded self-citations from their citations per faculty indicator in this year's World University Rankings. This is a very positive move that will remove some of the distortions that have crept into this indicator over the last few years. It would have been even better if they had excluded citations within journals and within institutions. Maybe next year.

It will be interesting to see if Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuters do the same with their rankings in October.It would not be very difficult and it might help to exclude Alexandria University and a few others from an undeserved place in the world's top universities for research impact.

(By the way Karolinska Institute is not in the US)

Although it may not make very much difference at the very top of this indicator, it seems that some places have suffered severely and others have benefited from the change. According to the QS intelligence unit:

Of all of the institutions we looked at the institution with the largest absolute number of self-citations, by some margin, is Harvard with over 93,000 representing 12.9% of their overall citations count
The top five institutions producing over 3,000 papers, in terms of proportion of self-citations are all in Eastern Europe – St Petersburg State University, Czech Technical University, Warsaw University of Technology, Babes-Bolyai University and Lomonosov Moscow State University
The top five in terms of the difference in citations per paper when self-citations are excluded are Caltech, Rockefeller, UC Santa Cruz, ENS Lyon and the University of Hawaii
And the top 10 in terms of the difference in citations per faculty when self-citations are included are:

#	Institution	Country
1	California Institute of Technology (Caltech)	United States
2	Rockefeller University	United States
3	Stanford University	United States
4	Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST)	South Korea
5	Karolinska Institute	United States
6	Princeton University	United States
7	Leiden University	Netherlands
8	Harvard University	United States
9	University of California, San Diego (UCSD)	United States
10	University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)	United States

2011-09-07T07:22:00.001+08:00

The Best University in the World
Update 8/9/2011 -- some comments added

For many people the most interesting thing about the QS rankings is the battle for the top place. The Shanghai rankings put Harvard in first place year after year and no doubt will do so for the next few decades. QS when it was in partnership with Times Higher Education also routinely put Harvard first. This is scarcely surprising since the research prowess of Cambridge has steadily declined in recent years. Still, Cambridge, Oxford and two London colleges did quite well mainly because they got high scores for international faculty and students and for the academic survey (not surprising since a disproportionate number of responses came from the UK, Australia and New Zealand) but not well enough to get over their not very distinguished research record.

Last year, however, Cambridge squeezed past Harvard. This was not because of the academic and employer surveys. That remained at 100 for both places. What happened was that between 2009 and 2010 Cambridge's score for citations per faculty increased from 89 to 93. This would be a fine achievement if it represented a real improvement. Unfortunately, almost every university with scores above 60 for this indicator in 2009 went up by a similar margin in 2010 while universities with scores below 50 slumped. Evidently, there was a new method of converting raw scores. Perhaps a mathematician out there can help.

And this year?

Cambridge and Harvard are both at 100 for the academic and employer surveys just like last year. (Note that although Harvard does better than Cambridge in both surveys they get the same reported score of 100).

For the faculty student ratio Harvard narrowed the gap a little from 3 to 2.5 points. In citations per faculty Cambridge slipped a bit by 0.3 points. However, Cambridge pulled further ahead on international students and faculty.

Basically, from 2004 to 2009 Harvard reigned supreme because its obvious superiority in research was more than enough to offset the advantages Cambridge enjoyed with regard to internationalisation (small country and policies favouring international students), faculty student ratio (counting non-teaching research staff) and the academic survey (disproportionate responses from the UK and Commonwealth). But this year and last the change in the method of converting the raw scores for citations per faculty artificially boosted Cambridge's overall scores.

So, is Cambridge really the world's top university?

2011-09-06T06:07:00.000+08:00

The THE-TR Rankings

The THE-TR World University Rankings will be published on October 6th.

There will be some changes. The weighting given to the citations indicator will be slightly reduced to 30% and internationalisation gets 7.5% instead of 5%.

There will be some tweaking of the citations indicator to avoid a repeat of the Alexandria and other anomalies. Let's hope it works.

In the research indicator there will be a reduction in the weighting given to the survey and public research income as a percentage of research income will be removed.

There will, unfortunately, be a slight increase in the percentage given of international students and a decline in that for international faculty.

2011-09-05T18:51:00.000+08:00

Commentary on the 2011 QS World University Rankings

From India

"University of Cambridge retains its number one spot ahead of Harvard, according to the QS World University Rankings 2011, released today. Meanwhile, MIT jumps to the third position, ahead of Yale and Oxford.

While the US continues to dominate the world ranking scenario, taking 13 of top 20 and 70 of top 300 places, 14 of 19 Canadian universities have ranked lower than 2010. As far as Europe is concerned, Germany, one of the emerging European destinations in recent times, has no university making it to the top 50 despite its Excellence Initiative.

Asian institutions - particularly those from Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and China - have fared well at a discipline level in subject rankings produced by QS this year - this is particularly true in technical and hard science fields.

Despite the Indian government's efforts to bring about a radical change in the Indian higher education sector, no Indian university has made it to the top 200 this year. However, China has made it to the top 50 and Middle East in the top 200 for the first time.

According to Ben Sowter, QS head of research, "There has been no (relative) improvement from any Indian institution this year. The international higher education scene is alive with innovation and change, institutions are reforming, adapting and revolutionising. Migration amongst international students and faculty continues to grow with little sign of slowing. Universities can no longer do the same things they have always done and expect to maintain their position in a ranking or relative performance.""

2011-09-05T18:47:00.000+08:00

Commentary on 2011 QS World University Rankings

From Ireland

SEÁN FLYNN, Education Editor
TCD AND UCD have continued to slide down the world university rankings in a trend which will concern Government, business and heads of colleges.

The latest QS rankings – published this morning – show a substantial drop in ranking for most Irish universities.

TCD drops down 13 places to 65; UCD is down 20 places from 114 to 134. NUI Galway suffers the most dramatic fall, down 66 places to 298. UCC bucked the trend, up marginally from 184 to 181.

The new international league table is a serious blow to the Irish university sector. Two years ago TCD was in the elite top 50 colleges, while UCD was in the top 100. Over the past two years both of Ireland’s leading colleges have lost significant ground.
The fall in Irish rankings was widely expected as the university sector has struggled to cope with a 6 per cent decline in employment and a funding crisis.

2011-09-05T18:42:00.001+08:00

Commentary on the 2011 QS World University Rankings

From New Zealand

"In tough times, good news comes for Australian institutions in Eighth QS World University Rankings®
- Eighth annual QS World University Rankings® sees all of the Group of Eight featured in the top 300
- Australian National University (26) remains Australia’s best-performing university but falls by 6 places.
- Seventeen Australian institutions featured in the top 300
- Based on six indicators including surveys of over 33,000 global academics and 16,000 graduate employers, the largest of their kind ever conducted
- New in 2011: results published alongside comparative international tuition fee on www.topuniversities.com"

2011-09-05T18:38:00.000+08:00

Commentary on the 2011 QS World University Rankings

From Malaysia

"PETALING JAYA: Universiti Malaya (UM) is the only Malaysian institution that has made it to the top 200 of the QS World University Rankings 2011/12.
It moved up 40 places to 167 this year compared to 207 in 2010.

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) have all slid down the rankings (see table).

UKM is ranked 279 this year compared to 263 in 2010; USM at 335 (309), UPM 358 (319) and UTM at between 401 and 450 (365).
...
For the first time, the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) and Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) were included in the rankings at 451-500 and 601+ respectively."

2011-09-05T18:33:00.000+08:00

Commentary on the QS 2011 World University Rankings

From Dubai

"Dubai: UAE University (UAEU) has moved up 34 places to come 338th in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings, which looked at more than 2,000 institutions to come up with a top 500 list.

UAEU officials said the university is working toward a top 100 spot. The university was also ranked 299th in the Life Sciences & Medicine subject category.The University of Cambridge was ranked as the top university in the world followed by Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Yale University, University of Oxford.
Saudi Arabia's King Saud University (KSU) came 200th and tops the list among Middle East institutions with King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM) and King Abdul Aziz University (KAU) coming in second and fifth respectively. American University of Beirut came third and UAEU fourth."

2011-09-05T07:46:00.000+08:00

QS Rankings Published

The rankings have now been published and can be accessed here.

The top 300 are included with total scores and tuition fees.

2011-09-05T07:37:00.000+08:00

QS Rankings Update

Some highlights are provided by CNW

Highlights:

Global: University of Cambridge retains number one spot ahead of Harvard, while MIT jumps to third ahead of Yale and Oxford; 38 countries in top 300
Government and private funding for technology-focussed research is eroding the dominance of traditional comprehensive universities. The average age of the top 100 institutions has dropped by seven years since 2010, reflecting the emergence of newer specialist institutions particularly in Asia
US/Canada: US takes 13 of top 20 and 70 of top 300 places; McGill (17) and Toronto (23) both up, but 14 of 19 Canadian universities rank lower than 2010
UK/Ireland: Oxford (5) and Imperial (6) leapfrog UCL (7), as four UK universities make the top 10; TCD (65) and UCD (134) both drop
Continental Europe: ETH Zurich (18) leads ENS Paris (33), EPFL (35) and ParisTech (36); no German university in top 50 despite Excellence Initiative
Asia: HKU (22) leads Tokyo (25), NUS (28) and Kyoto (32); India: IITB drops out of top 200; China: Tsinghua (47) joins Peking (46) in top 50
Australia: Gap between ANU (26) and Melbourne (31) closes from 18 to five, ahead of Sydney (38); G8 all make top 100
Middle East: King Saud University (200) makes top 200 for first time
Latin America: USP (169) makes top 200 for first time; five universities in top 300 (Brazil, Chile and Argentina)

2011-09-05T07:33:00.000+08:00

QS Rankings Update

The BBC reports on Scottish universities in the rankings.

The University of Glasgow has climbed 18 places in an international league table of higher education institutions.

Glasgow is now 59th in the QS World University Rankings, ahead of St Andrews which is in 97th place.
The University of Edinburgh is the highest ranked Scottish institution moving up two places to 20th position.
Principal of Glasgow, Professor Anton Muscatelli, said it had confirmed its position as one of the world's leading universities.

2011-09-05T06:47:00.000+08:00

QS Rankings Update

The National reports that UAE University has risen from 372nd to 338th place.

2011-09-05T06:33:00.000+08:00

QS Rankings 2011 Update

According to the Herald Sun, Cambridge has retained its place at the top of the QS rankings.

MELBOURNE is clawing its way up the ranks of the world's best universities, but Canberra is clinging on to top spot.
Australian National University is the nation's best tertiary institution, claiming 26th spot in the international league table.
But Melbourne University is hot on its heels - ranked 31st after jumping seven spots over the past year.
The UK's famed Cambridge University has claimed poll position, followed by Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University in the US.
Oxford University rounded out the top five, according to the QS World University Rankings, released yesterday.
Victoria's other top performers were Monash University, which jumped one spot to 60, and RMIT at 228.

2011-09-05T06:28:00.000+08:00

QS Rankings Update

Although they have not been released yet some news about the QS 2011 rankings is trickling out.

From Todayonline in Singapore

NTU [Nanyang Technological University] , NUS [National University of Singapore] climb the ladder in global university rankings

NTU leaps 16 places to take 58th spot, while NUS moves up three notches to take 28th spot

2011-09-03T19:59:00.000+08:00

The QS Rankings are Coming

QS will release their 2011 World University Rankings at 0101 GMT on Monday.They have already sent out fact files to the 600+ listed universities.

Things to look for.

Will Harvard regain it's position at the top from Cambridge? It might if QS revert to the previous method of converting the raw scores for the citations per faculty indicator.

Will spending cuts lead to a decline in the observed quality of British universities?

Will universities in China,Korea, Latin America and the Middle East repeat the successes they recorded in the Shanghai rankings?

Will Universiti Malaya return to the top 200? If it does will it be acknowledged as the number 1 Malaysian University?

Watch this space

2011-08-29T14:40:00.004+08:00

Japanese Universities Send a Strong Request

A very interesting document from the top 11 Japanese research universities has appeared. They are unhappy with the citations indicator in last year's Times Higher Education -- Thomson Reuters World University Rankings.

"The purpose of analyzing academic research data, particularly publication and citation trends is to provide diverse objective information on universities and other academic institutions that can be used by researchers and institutions for various evaluations and the setting of objectives. The 2010 Thomson Reuters / THE World University Rankings, however, do not give sufficient consideration to the unique characteristics of universities in different countries or the differing research needs and demands from society based on country, culture and academic field. As a result, those rankings are likely to lead to an unbalanced misleading and misuse of the citation index.

RU11 strongly requests, therefore, that Thomson Reuters / THE endeavors to contribute to academic society by providing objective and impartial data, rather than imposing a simplistic and trivialized form of university assessment."

It is a tactical mistake to go on about uniqueness. This is an excuse that has been used too often by institutions whose flaws have been revealed by international rankings.

Still, they do have a point. They go on to show that when the position of Asian universities according to the citations indicator in the THE-TR rankings is compared with the citations per paper indicator in the 2010 QS Asian university rankings, citations per paper over an 11 year period from TR's Essential Science Indicators and citations per paper/citations per faculty in the 2010 QS World university rankings (I assume they mean citations per faculty here since the QS World University Rankings do not have a citations per paper indicator) leading Japanese universities do badly while Chinese, Korean and other Asian universities do very well.

They complain that the THE--TR rankings emphasise "home run papers" and research that produces immediate results and that regional modification (normalisation) discriminates against Japanese universities.

This no doubt is a large part of the story but I suspect that the distortions of the 2010 THE--TR indicator are also because differences in the practice of self citation and intra--university citation, because TR's methodology actually favors those who publish relatively few papers and because of its bias towards low--cited disciplines.

The document continues:

"1. The ranking of citations based on either citations per author (or faculty) or citations per paper represent two fundamentally different ways of thinking with regards to academic institutions: are the institutions to be viewed as an aggregation of their researchers, or as an aggregation of the papers they have produced? We believe that the correct approach is to base the citations ranking on citations per faculty as has been the practice in the past.

2. We request a revision of the method used for regional modification.

3. We request the disclosure of the raw numerical data used to calculate the citation impact score for the various research fields at each university."

I suspect that TR and THE would reply that their methodology identifies pockets of excellence (which for some reason cannot be found anywhere in the Japanese RU 11), that the RU 11 are just poor losers and that they are right and QS is wrong.

This question might be resolved by looking at other measures of citations such as those produced by HEEACT, Scimago and ARWU.

It could be that this complaint if was sent to TR was the reason for TR and THE announcing that they were changing the regional weighting process this year. If that turns out to be the case and TR is perceived as changing its methodology to suit powerful vested interests then we can expect many academic eyebrows to be raised.

If the RU 11 are still unhappy then THE and TR might see a repeat of the demise of the Asiaweek rankings brought on in part because of a mass abstention by Japanese and other universities.

2011-08-27T20:57:00.000+08:00

The THE Citations Indicator

The Research Impact indicator in last year's Times Higher Education - Thomson Reuters World University Rankings led to much condemnation and not a little derision. Alexandria University was fourth in the world for research impact, with Bilkent, Turkey, Hong Kong Baptist University and several other relatively obscure institutions achieving remarkably high scores.

The villain here was Thomson Reuters' field and year normalisation system by which citations were compared with world benchmarks for field and year. This meant that a large number of citations within year of publication to a paper classified as being in a low cited field could have a disproportionate effect, which might be further enhanced if the university was in a region where citations were low.

Now THE have announced that this year there will be three changes. These are:

raising the threshold for inclusion in the citations indicator from 50 publications per year to 200
Extending the period for counting citations from five to six years
Changing regional normalisation so that it takes account of subject variations within regions as well as the overall level of citations.

Here are some things which Thomson Reuters apparently will not do:

reducing the weighting given to citations
not counting sell-citations, citations within institutions or citations within journals
using a variety of indications to assess research impact, such as h-index, total citations, citations per paper
using a variety of databases

So, everybody will have to wait until September to see what will happen.

2011-08-21T20:10:00.001+08:00

Value for Money

Recently, the Higher Education Funding Council of England published data indicating the percentage of UK students at English universities with grades AAB at A level. Oxford and Cambridge were at the top with 99% and Wolverhampton, Staffordshire and Hertfordshire at the bottom with 2%.

Now Hertfordshire statisticians have produced graphs comparing performance on four British league tables with tuition fees. Hertfordshire offers best value for tuition money in its band. Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Derby and London Metropolitan do well in theirs. Liverpool John Moores, East London and Bedfordshire are among the worst.

It should be noted that at the moment the differences between tuition levels are relatively small so this table may not mean very much.

2011-08-20T20:11:00.000+08:00

Perhaps They know Something You Don't

The Pew Research Center has issued a report showing that women are more likely than men to see the value of a college education. Men, says the report, are laggards. The implication is that women are more perceptive than men.

At a time when women surpass men by record numbers in college enrollment and completion, they also have a more positive view than men about the value higher education provides, according to a nationwide Pew Research Center survey. Half of all women who have graduated from a four-year college give the U.S. higher education system excellent or good marks for the value it provides given the money spent by students and their families; only 37% of male graduates agree. In addition, women who have graduated from college are more likely than men to say their education helped them to grow both personally and intellectually.

An article in Portfolio.com reviewing the report refers to another study from the Brookings Institute that finds that college is in fact an excellent investment .

Why then, are men apparently so uninformed about the benefits of higher education? The Pew report provides part of the answer when it discloses that men are much more likely than women to pay for college by themselves. A good investment, it seems, is even better when it is paid for by somebody else.

Also, let us compare the career prospects of men and women with average degrees in the humanities or social sciences. Even without affirmative action, men who are bored by diversity training, professional development, all sorts of sensitisation and other rituals of the feminised corporation and bureaucracy are unlike to get very far if anywhere.

And perhaps men are more likely to grow by themselves.

2011-08-17T21:53:00.000+08:00

A Rising Crescent?

One advantage of the methodological stability of the Shanghai university rankings is that it is possible to identify long term changes even though the year by year changes may be quite small.

One trend that becomes apparent when comparing the 2003 and 2011 rankings is the increasing number of universities from predominantly Muslim countries.

In 2003 there was exactly one listed, Istanbul University.

This year there were six: King Saud University, Saudi Arabia, in the 201-300 band, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia, Tehran University and Istanbul University in the 301-400 band and Cairo University and Universiti Malaya in the 401-500.

In the next year or two King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, headed by a former president of the National University of Singapore, will probably join the list.

2011-08-15T23:56:00.001+08:00

Another Twist in the Plot

The relationship between Malaysian universities and international rankers would make a good soap opera, full of break-ups, reconciliations and recriminations.

It started in 2004 when the first THES - QS ranking put Universiti Malaya (UM) in the top 100 and Universiti Sains Malaysia in the top 200. There was jubilation at the UM campus with triumphant banners all over the place. Then it all came crashing down in 2005 when QS revealed that they had made a mistake by counting ethnic minorities as international students and faculty. There followed a "clarification of data" and UM was expelled from the top 100.

The Malaysian opposition believed, or pretended to believe, that this was evidence of the unrelenting decline of the country's universities. The Vice-Chancellor of UM went off into the academic wilderness but still remained on QS's advisory board.

UM continued to pursue the holy grail of a top 200 ranking by the vigorous pursuit of publications and citations. There was discontent among the faculty voiced in a letter to a local newspaper:

"The writer claimed that many have left UM and “many more are planning to leave, simply because of the expectations from the management”.

“UM is not what it used to be. The academic staff are highly demoralised and unhappy due to the management’s obsession and fixation with ISI publications, while research, consultancy, and contribution to the nation, such as training of PhD students are considered as secondary,” the letter said."

In 2007 the Malaysian government asked for plans from universities to be considered for APEX (Accelerated Program for Academic Excellence) status which would include a substantial degree of university autonomy. It boiled down to a fight between UM and USM, which was won by USM apparently because of its inspiring plans.

'"The selection committee evaluated each university's state of readiness, transformation plan and preparedness for change. The university that is granted apex status is theone that has the highest potential among Malaysian universities to be world-class, and as such, would be given additional assistance to compete with top-ranking global institutions,‘addedKhaled. "Apex is about accelerated change. It is not about business as usual –but business unusual""USM has been working on its own transformation plan –We started with the ‘Healthy Campus’concept, before moving on to the‘University in a garden’concept. We subsequently adopted the ‘Research University’concept."Tan Sri DatoProf DzulkifliAbdul RazakVice Chancellor, USMSelection Committee Chairman, Dr. MohamadZawawi, former Vice Chancellor of Universiti Malaysia Sarawak said the committee also paid special attention to the institutions’strategic intent and transformation plans. Visits were made to short-listed institutions where discussions were held with senior staff, academicians, students and staff associations to understand the prevailing campus’‘climate’and factors related to the proposed plans.With apex status, USM will be given the autonomy to have the best in terms of governance, resources and talent and is expected to move up in the World University Rankings with a target of top 200 in five years and in the top 100, if not 50, by 2020.'

Note that USM was expected to use its status to climb the international rankings. However, it is now refusing to have anything to do with the rankings, something that is understandable.

The issue of which university deserves APEX was reopened this morning when it was announced that Universiti Malaya was in the top 500 of the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities.

This is unlikely to be a mistake like 2004. The Shanghai rankers have had methodological problems like what to do about merging or splitting universities but they do not change the basic methodology and they do not make serious mistakes. We are not going to hear next year about a clarification of data

UM's success is narrowly based. They have no Nobel prize winners, no highly cited researchers , only a handful of papers in Nature and Science but quite a lot of publications in ISI indexed journals. One might complain that there is too much emphasis on quantity but this is nevertheless a tangible achievement.

2011-08-15T06:50:00.000+08:00

Press release from Shanghai

Here is the press release from Shanghai Jiao Tong University giving more details about this year's rankings.

Monday, August 15, 2011
Shanghai, People's Republic of China
The Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University released today the 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), marking its 9th consecutive year of measuring the performance of top universities worldwide.
Harvard University tops the 2011 list; other Top 10 universities are: Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Cambridge, Caltech, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago and Oxford. In Continental Europe, ETH Zurich (23rd) in Switzerland takes first place, followed by Paris-Sud (40th) and Pierre and Marie Curie (41st) in France. The best ranked universities in Asia are University of Tokyo (21st) and Kyoto University (24th) in Japan.
Three universities are ranked among Top 100 for the first time in the history of ARWU: University of Geneva (73rd), University of Queensland (88th) and University of Frankfurt (100th). As a result, the number of Top 100 universities in Switzerland, Australia and Germany increases to 4, 4 and 6 respectively.
Ten universities first enter into Top 500, among them University of Malaya in Malaysia and University of Zagreb in Croatia enable their home countries to be represented, together with other 40 countries, in the 2011 ARWU list.
Progress of universities in Middle East countries is remarkable. King Saud University in Saudi Arabia first appears in Top 300; King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals in Saudi Arabia, Istanbul University in Turkey and University of Teheran in Iran move up in Top 400 for the first time; Cairo University in Egypt is back to Top 500 after five years of staggering outside.
The number of Chinese universities in Top 500 increases to 35 in 2011, with National Taiwan University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Tsinghua University ranked among Top 200.
The Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University also released the 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities by Broad Subject Fields (ARWU-FIELD) and 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities by Subject Field (ARWU-SUBJECT).Top 100 universities in five broad subject fields and in five selected subject fields are listed, where the best five universities are:
Natural Sciences and Mathematics – Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, Caltech and Cambridge
Engineering/Technology and Computer Sciences – MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, UIUC and Georgia Tech
Life and Agriculture Sciences – Harvard, MIT, UC San Francisco, Cambridge and Washington (Seattle)
Clinical Medicine and Pharmacy – Harvard, UC San Francisco, Washington (Seattle), Johns Hopkins and Columbia
Social Sciences – Harvard, Chicago, MIT, Berkeley and Columbia
Mathematics – Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford and Cambridge
Physics – MIT, Harvard, Caltech,Princeton and Berkeley
Chemistry – Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, Cambridge and ETH Zurich
Computer Science – Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Princeton and Harvard
Economics/Business – Harvard, Chicago, MIT, Berkeley and Columbia
The complete listsand detailed methodologies can be found at the Academic Ranking of World Universities website at http://www.ShanghaiRanking.com/.
Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU): Starting from 2003, ARWU has been presenting the world top 500 universities annually based on a set of objective indicators and third-party data. ARWU has been recognized as the precursor of global university rankings and the most trustworthy list. ARWU uses six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Scientific, number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index - Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance with respect to the size of an institution. More than 1000 universities are actually ranked by ARWU every year and the best 500 are published.
Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CWCU): CWCU has been focusing on the study of world-class universities for many years, published the first Chinese-language book titled world-class universities and co-published the first English book titled world-class universities with European Centre for Higher Education of UNESCO. CWCU initiated the "International Conference on World-Class Universities" in 2005 and organizes the conference every second year, which attracts a large number of participants from all major countries. CWCU endeavors to build databases of major research universities in the world and clearinghouse of literature on world-class universities, and provide consultation for governments and universities.
Contact: Dr.Ying CHENG at ShanghaiRanking@gmail.com

2011-08-15T06:42:00.001+08:00

Breaking News

The Shanghai rankings are out. Go here.

One interesting result is that Universiti Malaya is in the top 500 for the first time, mainly because of a large number of publications.

2011-08-11T00:01:00.000+08:00

America's Best Colleges

As the world waits anxiously for the publication of Princeton Review's Stone Cold Sober School Rankings (like everybody else I am praying the US Air Force Academy stays in the top ten), there are a few less important rankings like Shanghai's ARWU or the Forbes/CCAP (Center for College Affordabilty and Productivity) Rankings to study.

The latter, which have just been released, are designed for student consumers. The components are student satisfaction, post-graduate success, student debt, four-year graduation rate and competitive awards. They clearly fulfill a need that other rankings do not. It is possible that some of the indicators could be adopted for an international ranking. The top 10, a mix of Ivy League schools, small liberal arts colleges and service academies, are:

1. Williams College
2. Princeton
3. US Military Academy
4. Amherst College
5. Stanford
6. Harvard
7. Haverford College
8. Chicago
9. MIT
10. US Air Force Academy

2011-08-09T22:10:00.003+08:00

The Missing Indicator

There is an interesting item in Times Higher Education. Apparently leading universities might be offering financial inducements in the form of scholarships to students with AAB at A level. For Americans that would be something like a 3.9 GPA.

Universities like to proclaim that they provide something to students that enables them to succeed in the post university world, training in critical thinking, soft skills or exposure to a diverse multicultural society for which massive tuition fees can be extracted from parents or government. Whether they actually do is debatable. A book length study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift, indicated that universities do little to teach students how to think.

Employers seem to have a rather different view of the matter. Many restrict themselves to recruiting from only the elite universities and are quite unconcerned with whether universities have established learning outcomes or whether they have created a safe space for diverse students. They simply wish to recruit the most intelligent students that they can, with perhaps a bit of charm and likability for publicly visible positions.

Left to their own devices, universities would probably do their best to admit the most intelligent students available. The news that some are willing to pay for those with good A levels is a stark reminder that they are not being entirely honest in claiming that they provide an excellent education that is worth paying for. If that were the case, why not just put in a bit more effort and a few thousand pounds to turn an BBB or CCC student into an AAB. The answer is that while you might get a bit more out of a student by teaching reading and writing skills, basic numeracy and so on, recruiting from the top of the cognitive scale will bring much more to a university.

It is likely that calculating the average academic ability of students, or better still, their underlying intelligence might be an extremely valuable component in any international ranking system

Research Blogs has a table, derived from data from the Higher Education Funding Council of England, of universities according to the percentage of UK students with AAB or better at A levels.

If it were possible to calculate equivalences between the standardised tests or qualifications in various countries with some sort of adjustment for national differences in education or literacy, then an global ranking of universities according to student quality would be quite feasible.

The second column in this table shows the position of the institution when ranked by size.

		Ranked by percentage	AAB+	UK %
1	3	University of Oxford	2568	99
2	4	University of Cambridge	2554	99
3	18	Imperial College London	1094	96
4	23	London School of Economics	686	93
5	2	University of Durham	2581	85
6	8	University of Bristol	2199	85
7	13	University College London	1648	82
8	9	University of Warwick	2068	81
9	7	University of Exeter	2368	74
10	15	University of Bath	1496	69
11	17	King's College	1238	68
12	57	Royal Veterinary College	195	60
13	86	Conservatoire for Dance & D	71	59
14	35	SOAS	353	57
15	5	University of Nottingham	2505	57
16	12	University of Southampton	1686	54
17	14	University of York	1538	53
18	1	University of Manchester	2776	51
19	11	University of Sheffield	1846	49
20	10	University of Birmingham	1883	48
21	6	University of Leeds	2376	47
22	16	University of Newcastle	1332	43
23	19	Loughborough University	1042	38
24	91	School of Pharmacy	59	37
25	21	Lancaster University	740	32
26	25	Royal Holloway, London	589	32
27	20	University of Liverpool	886	32
28	33	City University	414	31
29	26	University of Leicester	578	30
30	22	Queen Mary	702	29
31	24	University of Sussex	630	29
32	32	Aston University	429	25
33	27	University of East Anglia	538	25
34	93	Blackpool and the Fylde	52	24
35	30	University of Surrey	433	23
36	95	Blackburn College	51	22
37	29	University of Reading	455	19
38	58	Goldsmiths College	180	17
39	72	University of Chichester	114	13
40	37	Brunel University	325	12
41	84	University College Falmouth	78	11
42	31	University of the Arts London	430	11
43	28	University of Kent	480	10
44	76	University of Cumbria	105	10
45	89	Arts UC at Bournemouth	67	9
46	67	Bath Spa University	144	9
47	55	University of Essex	200	8
48	56	University of Teesside	197	8
49	43	Southampton Solent	254	8
50	69	University Creative Arts	136	8
51	48	University of Lincoln	232	8
52	68	University of Worcester	142	8
53	80	Liverpool Hope University	97	8
54	42	Coventry University	262	7
55	50	Bournemouth University	227	7
56	54	Oxford Brookes University	213	7
57	63	University of Bedfordshire	163	7
58	64	University of East London	157	7
59	79	Edge Hill University	97	7
60	51	University of Brighton	215	7
61	39	University of Northumbria	283	7
62	41	University of Plymouth	278	7
63	62	London South Bank	165	7
64	60	Birmingham City University	170	6
65	75	University of Northampton	110	6
66	36	Sheffield Hallam University	340	6
67	65	Anglia Ruskin University	156	6
68	34	Nottingham Trent University	357	6
69	49	University of Hull	228	6
70	78	Keele University	99	6
71	77	University of Chester	100	6
72	52	University of Huddersfield	214	6
73	40	Kingston University	280	6
74	44	University West of England	238	5
75	46	University of Westminster	235	5
76	70	University of Derby	133	5
77	92	University of Bolton	55	5
78	73	University of Bradford	112	5
79	87	Thames Valley University	68	5
80	38	Manchester Metropolitan	290	5
81	47	De Montfort University	232	5
82	45	London Metropolitan	237	5
83	53	Liverpool John Moores	213	5
84	71	Middlesex University	126	5
85	61	Central Lancashire	168	4
86	94	Roehampton University	51	4
87	83	University of Sunderland	79	4
88	90	University of Gloucestershire	65	4
89	59	University of Greenwich	178	3
90	66	University of Portsmouth	152	3
91	74	Leeds Metropolitan	111	3
92	88	University of Salford	67	3
93	85	University of Wolverhampton	76	2
94	82	University of Hertfordshire	85	2
95	81	Staffordshire University	91	2

2011-08-09T00:33:00.000+08:00

Worth Reading

University World News has some new articles on rankings by Ellen Hazelkorn, Philip Altbach and Danny Byrne of QS. It also provides links to several older articles.

2011-08-02T09:33:00.000+08:00

Ranking Fever Rages in the US

Forget Shanghai, QS and Times Higher. The really important ranking has just been released by Princeton Review.

Ohio University in Athens has replaced the University of Georgia in Athens as the top party school (one wonders if all the respondents could remember where they were).

Other number ones are:

Amazing College Campus: Elon University, NC
Top Online University: Penn State University World Campus

And more to come.

2011-07-31T17:29:00.002+08:00

Latest Webometrics Rankings

Webometrics have just released their latest rankings. These are based on the web-related activities of universities as measured by:

the number of pages recovered from four engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead
the total number of unique external links received (inlinks)
rich files in Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Adobe PostScript (.ps), Microsoft Word (.doc) and Microsoft Powerpoint (.ppt).
data were extracted using Google results from the Scholar database representing papers, reports and other academic items

The Webometrics ranking might be considered a crude instrument but nonetheless it does measure something that, while not synonymous with quality, is still a necessary precondition.

Here are the top three in each region:

USA and Canada
1. MIT
2. Harvard
3. Stanford

Latin America
1. Sao Paulo
2. National Autonmous University of Mexico
3. Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Europe
1. Cambridge
2. Oxford
3. Southampton

Central and Eastern Europe
1. Charles University in Prague
2. Masaryk University in Brno
3. Ljubljana, Slovenia

Asia
1. National Taiwan University
2. Tokyo
3. Kyoto

South East Asia
1. National University of Singapore
2. Kasetsart, Thailand
3. Chulalongkorn, Thailand

South Asia
1. IIT Bombay
2. IIS Bangalore
3. IIT Kanpur

Arab World
1. King Saud University
2. King Fahd University of Petroleum and minerals
3. Kng Abdul Aziz University

Oceania
1. Australian National University
2. Melbourne
3. Queensland

Africa
1. Cape Town
2. Pretoria
3. Stellenbosch

2011-07-19T21:59:00.000+08:00

Rankings as Imperialism

A conference was held in Malaysia recently, ostensibly to "challenge Western stereotypes of knowledge."

There was a comment on international university rankings by James Campbell of Universiti Sains Malaysia.

"Others warn of the threats of new colonialism practices such as rankings exercises.

“This is another form of imperialism as universities have to conform with publishing in ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) journals in order to be ranked among the best in the world,” says Campbell."

There are many things wrong with rankings but this is not a valid criticism. The Shanghai rankings have shown the steady advance of Chinese and Korean and to a lesser extent Latin American and Southwest Asian universities. The QS rankings (formerly THE -QS) were notoriously biased towards Southeast Asia with a heavy weighting being given to a survey originally based largely on the mailing lists of a Singapore based publishing company (that may no longer be the case) .

As for the the current THE - Thomson Reuters rankings, they have declared an Egyptian university to be the fourth best in the world for research impact.

The inadequacies of current rankings have been discussed here and elsewhere. But whether it is helpful to anyone to reject them altogether is very debatable.

Most of the conference was devoted not to rankings per se. but to supposed critiques of western science. Readers may judge these for themselves.

2011-07-17T22:47:00.000+08:00

Pseudo-science in the academy

A comment by Ameen Amjad Khan in University World News draws attention to the continuing problem of pseudo-science in universities. He lists creationism. anti-evolutionism, magnetic healing, perpetual motion, quantum mysticisms, New Age physics, parapsychology, repressed memory, homeopathy and fake self-help schemes.

To which we could add some products of pseudo-social science such as multiple intelligences, emotional and spiritual quotient, Outcomes Based Education and just about anything related to management studies.

2011-07-17T22:26:00.000+08:00

Off topic a bit
The Independent has an article by Alex Duval Smith, "the man who proved that everyone is good at maths"

It describes a French academician, Marc Chemillier, who has written a book , "Les Mathematiques Naturelles" that claims that maths is simple and rooted in human sensory intuition. He has travelled to Madagascar because "he believes that Madagascar's population, which remains relatively untouched by outside influences, can help him to prove this".

Smith quotes Chemillier as saying: "There is a strong link between counting and the number of fingers on our hands. Maths becomes complicated only when you abandon basic measures in nature, like the foot or the inch, or even the acre, which is the area that two bulls can plough in a day."

Ploughing a field with bulls is natural? Isn't that a little ethnocentric and chronocentric?

Smith goes on:

"To make his point, Mr Chemillier chose to charge up his laptop computer, leave Paris and do the rounds of fortune tellers on the Indian Ocean island [Madagascar] because its uninfluenced natural biodiversity also extends to its human population. Divinatory geomancy – reading random patterns, or sikidy to use the local word – is what Raoke does, when not smoking cigarettes rolled with paper from a school exercise book."

The idea that the population of Madagascar is untouched, even relatively, by outside influences is rather odd. The ancestors of the Malagasy travelled across the Indian Ocean from Borneo, a voyage more arduous than those of Columbus. Since then, the island has received immigrants and ideas from and traded with East Africa, Arabia, Persia, India and Europe. Sikidy itself is a local adoption of the medieval Muslim art of divination, adapted to local conditions.

It is difficult to see how Raoke's abilty to recall complex patterns created by removing seeds in ones or twos from piles proves that everybody is good at maths. He has probably been divining for half a century and it is a safe bet that he has put in the ten thousand hours that Malcolm Gladwell thinks is necessary to turn anyone into a genius.

I suspect, however, that we are going to hear more about the diviners of Madagascar as universities and schools throughout the world are relentlessly dumbed down. No need to study the needless complexities of calculus: a pile of seeds and illiterate intuition is all you need.

2011-07-14T15:26:00.000+08:00

What do you do if you hold a quality initiative and nobody comes?

The Higher Education Commission of Pakistan is proposing to rank all private and public universities in the country. Unfortunately, the universities do not seem very keen on the idea and most of them are not submitting data.

"An official of HEC told APP that all public and private Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) were asked to submit their data by July 15 for carrying out ranking process but around 10 out of 132 universities have submitted their data. HEC is taking the initiative of ranking the universities to help strengthen their indigenous quality culture and improve international visibility. The HEC has already directed the universities to meet the deadline for providing authentic data and those which failed to provide data will be ranked zero by placing them at the bottom in the ranking list to be published through print media.

HEC’ initiative to carry out quality based ranking of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) is aimed at international compatibility, primarily based on the QS Ranking System acceptable widely across countries. The commission has taken various initiatives to bring HEIs of Pakistan at par with international standards and ranking is one of the measures to scale the success of efforts to achieve international competitiveness in education, research and innovation."

The problem of conscientious objectors and of universities that might simply not be able to collect data is one that has plagued global and national rankers from the beginning. Times Higher and Thomson Reuters allow universities to opt out but that is risky if those opting out include the likes of Texas at Austin. On the other hand, QS will collect data from third party and national sources if universities fail to cooperate.

2011-07-13T16:45:00.000+08:00

What Global Rankings Ignore
(at least some of them)

Inside Higher Ed has an article by Indira Samarasekera, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Alberta, that voices some fairly conventional complaints about international university rankings. She has some praise for two of the rankers:

"The problems with national and international rankings are numerous and well known. So well known, in fact, that the world’s most powerful ranking organizations — the World’s Best Universities Rankings conducted by U.S. News & World Report in partnership with Quacquarelli Symonds and the Times Higher Education Rankings — have been working diligently to revise ranking measures and their methods in an attempt to increase the accuracy and objectivity of the rankings.

It should be pointed out that U.S. News & World report does not conduct any world rankings: it just publishes those prepared by QS. And I wonder how successful those diligent attempts will be.

She goes on:

"From my perspective, rankings are also missing the mark by failing to shine a light on some of the most significant benefits that universities bring to local, national and global societies. The focus of most rankings is on academic research outputs — publications, citations and major awards — that stand in as proxies for research quality and reach. While these outputs do a fairly good job of pinpointing the impact of a university’s contributions to knowledge, especially in science, technology, engineering and health sciences, they provide little indication of what kind of impact these advancements have on factors that the global community generally agrees are markers of prosperous and secure societies with a high quality of life.

Let me give you an example of what I mean: governments and policy makers everywhere now consider universities as economic engines as well as educational institutions. Public investments in research are increasingly directed toward research with the potential to translate into products, processes and policies — even whole new industries. This trend in research funding reveals a lot about the ways in which universities matter to governments, policy makers, regions and the public today, but the rankers aren’t paying attention.

Consider Israel. According to data on NASDAQ’s website, Israel has more companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange than any other country in the world except the U.S., and major companies such as Intel, Microsoft, IBM and Google have major research and development centers in Israel. Why? If you look at the data, you see a correlation between this entrepreneurial activity and the investments in and outputs from Israel’s universities.

Israel is among a handful of nations with the highest public expenditure on educational institutions relative to GDP, and it has the highest rate of R&D investment relative to GDP in the world. It also has the highest percentage of engineers in the work force and among the highest ratio of university degrees per capita. Many of the companies listed on NASDAQ were started by graduates of Israel’s universities: Technion, Tel Aviv University, Weizmann Institute and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to mention a few. Do international university rankings capture these economic impacts from research and postsecondary education in Israel? The answer is no. In spite of their tremendous impact and output, Israel’s universities are ranked somewhere in the 100 to 200 range."

In fact, the Shanghai rankings had the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 72nd position in 2010 and the percentage of Israeli universities in the Shanghai 500 was higher than any other country. So, the vice-chancellor's logic leads to the conclusion that Shanghai does at a better job at capturing this aspect of excellence than QS or THE.

Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem were not in the THE 200 or indeed the THE top 400. What happened is that Thomson Reuters either did not receive or did not ask for the information.

2011-07-12T17:37:00.008+08:00

This WUR had such promise

The new Times Higher Education World University Rankings of 2010 promised much, new indicators based on income, a reformed survey that included questions on postgraduate teaching, a reduction in the weighting given to international students.

But the actual rankings that came out in September were less than impressive. Dividing the year's intake of undergraduate students by the total of academic faculty looked rather odd. Counting the ratio of doctoral students to undergraduates, while omitting masters programs, was an invitation to the herding of marginal students into substandard doctoral degree programmes.

The biggest problem though was the insistence on giving a high weighting – somewhat higher than originally proposed -- to citations. Nearly a third of the total weighting was assigned to the average citations per paper normalized by field and year. The collection of statistics about citations is the bread and butter of Thomson Reuters (TR), THE’s data collector, and one of their key products is the Incites system, which apparently was the basis for their procedure during the 2010 ranking exercise. This compares the citation records of academics with international scores benchmarked by year and field. Of course, those who want to find out exactly where they stand have to find out what the benchmark scores are and that is something that cannot be easily calculated without Thomson Reuters.

Over the last two or three decades the number of citations received by papers, along with the amount of money attracted from funding agencies, has become an essential sign of scholarly merit. Things have now reached the point where, in many universities, research is simply invisible unless it has been funded by an external agency and then published in a journal noted for being cited frequently by writers who contribute to journals that are frequently cited. The boom in citations has begun to resemble classical share and housing bubbles as citations acquire an inflated value increasingly detached from any objective reality.

It has become clear that citations can be manipulated as much as, perhaps more than, any other indicator used by international rankings. Writers can cite themselves, they can cite co-authors, they can cite those who cite them. Journal editors and reviewers can make suggestions to submitters about who to cite. And so on.

Nobody, however, realized quite how unrobust citations might become until the unplanned intersection of THE’s indicator and a bit of self citation and mutual citation by two peripheral scientific figures raised questions about the whole business.

One of these two was Mohamed El Naschie who comes from a wealthy Egyptian family. He studied in

Germany

and took a Ph D in engineering at University College London. Then he taught in

Saudi Arabia

while writing several papers that appear to have been of an acceptable academic standard although not very remarkable.

But this was not enough. In 1993 he started a new journal dealing with applied mathematics and theoretical physics called Chaos, Solitons and Fractals (CSF), published by the leading academic publishers, Elsevier. El Naschie’s journal published many papers written by himself. He has, to his credit, avoided exploiting junior researchers or insinuating himself into research projects to which he has contributed little. Most of his papers do not appear to be research but rather theoretical speculations many of which concern the disparity between the mathematics that describes the universe and that which describes subatomic space and suggestions for reconciling the two.

Over the years El Naschie has listed a number of universities as affiliations. The University of Alexandra was among the most recent of them. It was not clear, however, what he did at or for the university and it was only recently, after the publication of the 2010 THE World University Rankings, that there is documentation of any official connection.

El Naschie does not appear to be highly regarded by physicists and mathematicians, as noted earlier in this blog, and he has been criticized severely in the physics and mathematics blogosphere. He has, it is true, received some very vocal support but he is not really helped by the extreme enthusiasm and uniformity of style of his admirers. Here is a fairly typical example, from the comments in Times Higher Education:

“As for Mohamed El Naschie, he is one of the most original thinkers of our time. He mastered science, philosophy, literature and art like very few people. Although he is an engineer, he is self taught in almost everything, including politics. Now I can understand that a man with his charisma and vast knowledge must be the object of envy but what is written here goes beyond that. My comment here will be only about what I found out regarding a major breakthrough in quantum mechanics. This breakthrough was brought about by the work of Prof. Dr. Mohamed El Naschie”

Later, a professor at Donghua University, China, Ji-Huan He, an editor at El Naschie’s journal, started a similar publication, the International Journal of Nonlinear Sciences and Numerical Simulation (IJNSNS), whose editorial board included El Naschie. This journal was published by the respectable and unpretentious Israeli company, Freund of Tel Aviv. Ji-Huan He’s journal has published 29 of his own papers and 19 by El Naschie. The two journals have contained articles that cite and are cited by articles in the other. Since they deal with similar topics some degree of cross citation is to be expected but here it seems to be unusually large.

Let us look at how El Naschie worked. An example is his paper, ‘The theory of Cantorian spacetime and high energy particle physics (an informal review)’, published in Chaos, Solitons and Fractals,41/5, 2635-2646, in September 2009.

There are 58 citations in the bibliography. El Naschie cites himself 24 times, 20 times to papers in Chaos, Solitons and Fractals and 4 in IJNSNS. Ji-Huan He is cited twice along with four other authors from CSF. This paper has been cited 11 times, ten times in CSF in issues of the journal published later in the year.

Articles in mathematics and theoretical physics do not get cited very much. Scholars in those fields prefer to spend time thinking about an interesting paper before settling down to comment. Hardly any papers get even a single citation in the same year. Here we have 10 for one paper. That might easily be 100 times the average for that discipline and that year.

The object of this exercise had nothing to do with the THE rankings. What it did do was to push El Naschie’s journal into the top ranks of scientific journals as measured by the Journal Impact Factor, that is the number of citations per paper within a two year period. It also meant that for a brief period El Naschie was listed by Thomson Reuters’ Science Watch as a rising star of research.

Eventually, Elsevier appointed a new editorial board at CSF that did not include El Naschie. The journal did however continue to refer to him as the founding editor. Since then the number of citations has declined sharply.

Meanwhile, Ji-huan He was also accumulating a large number of citations, many of them from conference proceedings that he had organized. He was launched into the exalted ranks of the ISI Highly Cited Researchers and his journal topped the citation charts in mathematics. Unfortunately, early this year Freund sold off its journals to the reputed German publishers De Gruyter, who appointed a new editorial board that did not include either him or El Naschie.

El Naschie, He and a few others have been closely scrutinized by Jason Rush, a mathematician formerly of the University of Washington. Rush was apparently infuriated by El Naschie s unsubstantiated claims to have held senior positions at a variety of universities including Cambridge, Frankfurt, Surrey and Cornell. Since 2009 he has closely, perhaps a little obsessively, published a blog that chronicles the activities of El Naschie and those associated with him. Most of what is known about El Naschie and He was unearthed by his blog, El Naschie Watch.

Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters were preparing their analysis of citations for the THE rankings. They used the Incites system and compared the number of citations with benchmark scores representing the average for year and field.

This meant that for this criterion a high score did not necessarily represent a large number of citations. It could simply represent more citations than normal in a short period of time in fields where citation was infrequent and, perhaps more significantly since we are talking about averages here, a small total number of publications. Thus, Alexandria, with only a few publications but listed as the affiliation of an author who was cited much more frequently than usual in theoretical physics or applied mathematics, did spectacularly well.

This is rather like declaring Norfolk (very flat according to Oscar Wilde) the most mountainous county in England because of a few hillocks that were nonetheless relatively much higher than the surrounding plains.

Thomson Reuters would have done themselves a lot of good if they had taken the sensible course of using several indicators of research impact, such as total citations, citations per faculty, the h-index or references in social media or if they had allocated a smaller weighting to the indicator or if they had imposed a reasonable threshold number of publications instead of just 50 or if they had not counted self-citations, or citations within journals or if they had figured out a formula to detect mutual citations..

So, in September THE published its rankings with University of Alexandria in the top 200 overall and in fourth place for research impact, ahead of Oxford, Cambridge and most of the Ivy league. Not bad for a university that had not even been counted by HEEACT, QS or the Shanghai rankings and that in 2010 had lagged behind two other institutions in Alexandria itself in Webometrics.

When the rankings were published THE pointed out that Alexandria had once had a famous library and that a former student had gone on to the

USA

to eventually win a Nobel prize decades later. Still, they did concede that the success of Alexandria was mainly due to one "controversial" author.

Anyone with access to the Web of Science could determine in a minute precisely who the controversial author was. For a while it was unclear exactly how a few dozen papers and a few hundred citations could put Alexandria among the world’s elite. Some observers wasted time wondering if Thomson Reuters had been counting papers from a community college in Virginia or Minnesota, a branch of the Louisiana State University or federal government offices in the Greater Washington area. Eventually, it was clear that El Naschie could not, as he himself asserted, have done it by himself: he needed the help of the very distinctive features of Thomson Reuters’ methodology.

There were other oddities in the 2010 rankings. Some might have accepted a high placing for Bilkent University in Turkey. It was well known for its Academic English programs. It also had one much cited article whose apparent impact was increased because it was classified as multidisciplinary, usually a low cited category, thereby scoring well above the world benchmark. However, when regional patterns were analyzed, the rankings began to look rather strange, especially the research impact indicator. In Australia, the Middle East, Hong Kong and Taiwan the order of universities, looked rather different from what local experts expected. Hong Kong Baptist University the third best in the SAR? Pohang University of Science and Technology so much better than Yonsei or KAIST? Adelaide the fourth best Australian university?

In the UK or the US these placings might seem plausible or at least not worth bothering about. But in the Middle East the idea of Alexandria as top university even in Egypt is a joke and the places awarded to the others look very dubious.

THE and Thomson Reuters tried to shrug off the complaints by saying that there were just a few outliers which they were prepared to debate and that anyone who criticized them had a vested interest in the old THE-QS rankings which had been discredited. They dropped hints that the citations indicator would be reviewed but so far nothing specific has emerged.

A few days ago, however, Phil Baty of THE seemed to imply that there was nothing wrong with the citations indicator.

Normalised data allow fairer comparisons, and that is why Times Higher Education will employ it for more indicators in its 2011-12 rankings, says Phil Baty.

One of the most important features of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings is that all our research citations data are normalised to take account of the dramatic variations in citation habits between different academic fields.

Treating citations data in an “absolute manner”, as some university rankings do, was condemned earlier this year as a “mortal sin” by one of the world’s leading experts in bibliometrics, Anthony van Raan of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University. In its rankings, Times Higher Education gives most weight to the “research influence” indicator – for our 2010-11 exercise, this drew on 25 million citations from 5 million articles published over five years. The importance of normalising these data has been highlighted by our rankings data supplier, Thomson Reuters: in the field of molecular biology and genetics, there were more than 1.6 million citations for the 145,939 papers published between 2005 and 2009; in mathematics, however, there were just 211,268 citations for a similar number of papers (140,219) published in the same period.

To ignore this would be to give a large and unfair advantage to institutions that happen to have more provision in molecular biology, say, than in maths. It is for this crucial reason that Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings examine a university’s citations in each field against the global average for that subject.

Yes, but when we are assessing hundreds of universities in very narrowly defined fields we start running into quite small samples that can be affected by deliberate manipulation or by random fluctuations.

Another point is that if there are many more journals, papers, citations and grants in oncology or genetic engineering than in the spatialization of gender performativity or the influence of Semitic syntax on Old Irish then perhaps society is telling us something about what it values and that is something that should not be dismissed so easily.

So, it could be we are going to get the University of Alexandria in the top 200 again, perhaps joined by Donghua university.

At the risk of being repetitive, there are a few simple things that Times Higher and TR could do to make the citations indicator more credible. There are also more ways of measuring research excellence.Possibly they are thinking about them but so far there is no sign of this.

The credibility of last year's rankings has declined further with the decisions of the judge presiding over the libel case brought by El Naschie against Nature (see here for commentary). Until now it could be claimed that El Naschie was a wll known scientist by virtue of the large numbers of citations that he had received or at least an interesting and controversial maverick.

El Naschie is pursuing a case against Nature for publishing an article that suggested his writings were not of a high quality and that those published in his journal did not appear to be properly peer reviewed

The judge has recently ruled ruled that El Naachie cannot proceed with a claim for specific damages since he has not brought any evidence for this. He can only go ahead with a claim for general damages for loss of reputation and hurt feelings. Even here, it looks like it will be tough going. El Naschie seems to be unwilling or unable to find expert witnesses to testify to the scientific merits of his papers.

"The Claimant is somewhat dismissive of the relevance of expert evidence in this case, largely on the basis that his field of special scientific knowledge is so narrow and fluid that it is difficult for him to conceive of anyone qualifying as having sufficient "expert" knowledge of the field. Nevertheless, permission has been obtained to introduce such evidence and it is not right that the Defendants should be hindered in their preparations."

He also seems to have problems with locating records that would demonstrate that his many articles published in Chaos, Solitons and Fractals were adequately reviewed.

The first subject concerns the issue of peer-review of those papers authored by the Claimant and published in CSF. It appears that there were 58 articles published in 2008. The Claimant should identify the referees for each article because their qualifications, and the regularity with which they reviewed such articles, are issues upon which the Defendants' experts will need to comment. Furthermore, it will be necessary for the Defendants' counsel to cross-examine such reviewers as are being called by the Claimant as to why alleged faults or defects in those articles survived the relevant reviews.
Secondly, further information is sought as to the place or places where CSF was administered between 2006 and 2008. This is relevant, first, to the issue of whether the Claimant has complied with his disclosure obligations. The Defendants' advisers are not in a position to judge whether a proportionate search has been carried out unless they are properly informed as to how many addresses and/or locations were involved. Secondly, the Defendants' proposed expert witnesses will need to know exactly how the CSF journal was run. This information should be provided.

It would therefore seem to be getting more and more difficult for anyone to argue that TR's methodology has uncovered a pocket of excellence in Alexandria.

Unfortunately, it is beginning to look as though THE will not only use much the same method as last time but will apply normalisation to other indicators as well.

But what about the other performance indicators used to compare institutions? Our rankings examine the amount of research income a university attracts and the number of PhDs it awards. For 2011-12, they will also look at the number of papers a university has published that are co-authored by an international colleague.

Don’t subject factors come into play here, too? Shouldn’t these also be normalised? We think so. So I am pleased to confirm that for the 2011-12 World University Rankings, Times Higher Education will introduce subject normalisation to a range of other ranking indicators.
This is proving very challenging. It makes huge additional demands on the data analysts at Thomson Reuters and, of course, on the institutions themselves, which have had to provide more and richer data for the rankings project. But we are committed to constantly improving and refining our methodology, and these latest steps to normalise more indicators evidence our desire to provide the most comprehensive and rigorous tables we can.

What this might mean is that universities that spend modest amounts of money in fields where little money is usually spent would get a huge score. So what would happen if an eccentric millionaire left millions to establish a lavishly funded research chair in continental philosophy at Middlesex University? There are no doubt precautions that Thomson Reuters could take but will they? The El Naschie business does not inspire very much confidence that they will.

The reception of the 2010 THE WUR rankings suggests that the many in the academic world have doubts about the wisdom of using normalised citation data without considering the potential for gaming or statistical anomalies. But the problem may run deeper and involve citations as such. QS, THE 's rival and former partner, have produced a series of subject rankings based on data from 2010. The overall results for each subject are based on varying combinations of the scores for academic opinion, employer opinion and citations per paper (not per faculty as in the general rankings).

The results are interesting. Looking at citations per paper alone we see that Boston College and Munich are jointly first in Sociology. Rutgers is third for politics and international studies. MIT is third for philosophy (presumably Chomsky and co). Stellenbosch is first for Geography and Area studies. Padua is first for linguistics. Tokyo Metropolitan University is second for biological sciences and Arizona State University first.

Pockets of excellence or statistical anomalies? These results may not be quite as incredible as Alexandria in the THE rankings but they are not a very good advertisement for the validity of citations as a measure of research excellence.

It appears that THE have not made their minds up yet. There is still time to produce a believable and rigorous ranking system. But whatever happens, it is unlikely that citations, normalized or unnormalized, will continue to be the unquestionable gold standard of academic and scientific research.

2011-07-10T07:56:00.001+08:00

The Coming Ascendancy of China

Matthew Reisz in Times Higher Education reports that Wen Jiabao, Prime Minister of China, has been awarded the King Charles II medal by the Royal Society for an ambitious national research program.

"The scale and success of Chinese investment in research was reflected in findings released last month by Thomson Reuters - drawing on data collected for the Times Higher Education World University Rankings - which showed that the country's elite C9 League now generates more income per academic staff member than the UK's Russell Group.

The top Chinese universities also award the highest number of doctoral degrees per academic.
Despite a vast increase in output over the past decade, there has been no discernible dip in standards, and the quality of the research produced by Chinese universities has remained at about the world average."

Some warnings are necessary. It is debatable whether the generation of research income is always a good indicator of quality. For one thing, note that the report talks about "per academic staff". Getting rid of or forgetting about "unproductive" departments like philosophy or languages could boost scores as easily as getting grants.

Still, it seems likely that the Chinese are on the way to scientific supremacy, at least in the natural sciences. There are obstacles ahead such as centralised control that might one day slow down the growth of research. They might even read Times Higher and stop being so unpleasantly aggressive and competitive, but at the moment that seems unlikely.

Incidentally, do the data collected for the THE World University Rankings tell us anything that we couldn't learn from the Shanghai rankings?

2011-07-05T19:10:00.001+08:00

QS Subject Rankings for the Social Sciences

QS have released their subject rankings for the social sciences based on data gathered during last year's rankings.

The overall rankings are not surprising. Here are top three in each subject.

Sociology
1. Harvard
2. UC Berkeley
3. Oxford

Statistics and Operational Research
1. Stanford
2. Harvard
3. UC Berkeley

Politics and International Studies
1. Harvard
2. Oxford
3. Cambridge

Law
1. Harvard
2. Oxford
3. Cambridge

Economics and Econometrics
1. Harvard
2. MIT
3. Stanford

Accounting and Finance
1. Harvard
2. Oxford
3. MIT

The top three in the citations per paper indicator is, in most cases, rather different. Are these pockets of excellence or something else?

Sociology
1= Boston College
1= Munich
3. Florida State University

Statistics and Operational Research
1. Aarhus
2. Helsinki
3. Erasmus University Rotterdam

Politics and International Studies
1. Yale
2. Oslo
3. Rutgers

Law
1. Victoria University of Wellington
2. Koln
3. Munster

Economics and Econometrics
1. Dartmouth
2. Harvard
3. Princeton

Accounting and Finance
1. University of Pennsylvania
2= Harvard
2= North Carolina at Chapel Hill

2011-07-01T15:02:00.001+08:00

Worth Reading

Andrejs Rauhvargers, Global University Rankings and their Impact (European University Association).
Rauhvargers

2011-07-01T14:51:00.000+08:00

Interesting News

U.S. News are getting ready to start ranking American online colleges.

2011-07-01T14:43:00.000+08:00

The THE Survey

Times Higher Education and its partner Thomson Reuters have announced the completion of their survey of academic opinion. There were 17,554 responses from 137 countries, nearly a third more than last year. That means nearly 31,000 responses over the last two years but THE, in contrast to their rivals, QS, will only count responses to this year's survey.

QS have still not closed their survey so it looks as though they might well be push the number of responses to their survey over 17,500 and claim victory. THE, no doubt, will point out that all of their respondents are new ones and that QS are counting respondents from 2010 and 2009.

THE have indicated the number of responses but not the number of survey forms that were sent out. So, the response rate for the survey is still unknown. This is more important for judging the validity of the survey than just the number of responses.

2011-06-20T05:10:00.001+08:00

QS Latin American Rankings

QS have published the results of their preliminary study for a Latin American university ranking. This would be the second in their series of regional rankings after the Asian rankings, now in the third year.

The methodology suggested by the rankings is as follows:

Latin American Academic Reputation 30%
Papers per Faculty 10%
Citations per Paper 10%
Student Faculty Ratio 10%
Staff with Ph D 10%
Latin American Employer Reputation 20%
International Faculty 2.5%
International Students 2.5%
Inbound Exchange Students 2.5%
Outbound Exchange Students 2.5%

QS's surveys have been criticised on several grounds, including low response rates. However, the employer survey is valuable as an external assessment of universities, while the academic survey might be considered a complement to citations-based indicators which in both the THE and QS rankings have thrown up some odd results.

There are two indicators that are directly research based. The apparent ease with which citations can be manipulated means that a variety of indicators could be used here, including citations per paper, h-index, total publications and citations, proportion of funded research and publications in high impact journals.QS have missed an opportunity here.

Student faculty ratio is allocated 10% instead of 20 % as in the international ranking. This is an admittedly crude proxy for teaching quality. QS are apparently experimenting with a student satisfaction survey which might produce more valid results.

Ten per cent goes to the proportion of staff with Ph Ds. This may well encourage the further and pointless over-production of substandard doctorates.

Five per cent goes to international students and international faculty. I am not sure that this will mean very much especially in the smaller Central American republics. Counting exchange students is definitely not a good idea. This is something that can be easily manipulated. In the Asian rankings there were some large and puzzling increases in the numbers of exchange students between 2009 and 2010.

2011-06-16T16:59:00.000+08:00

The QS Arts and Humanities Rankings

See here for the complete rankings.

Here are the top five in each indicator, academic survey, employer survey, citations per paper of the QS subject rankings.

There is nothing surprising about the leaders in the two surveys. But the citations indicator is another matter. Perhaps, QS has followed Times Higher in uncovering "clear pockets of excellence". Would any specialists out there like to comment on Newcastle University (the English one, not the Australian) and Durham as first for history -- something to do with proximity to Hadrian's Wall? What about Brown for Philosophy, Stellenbosch for Geography and Area Studies and Padua for linguistics?

English Language and Literature
Academic survey
1. Harvard
2. Oxford
3. Cambridge
4. UC Berkeley
5. Yale

Employer Survey
1. Oxford
2. Cambridge
3. Harvard
4. MIT
5. UC Los Angeles

No ranking for citations

Modern Languages
Academic Survey
1. Harvard
2, UC Berkeley
3. Oxford
4. Cambridge
5. Cornell

Employer Survey
1. Harvard
2. Oxford
3. Cambridge
4. MIT
5. Stanford

No rankings for citations

History
Academic Survey
1. Harvard
2. Cambridge
3. Oxford
4. Yale
5. UC Berkeley

Employer Survey
1. Oxford
2. Harvard
3. Cambridge
4. University of Pennsylvania
5. Yale

Citations per Paper
1= Newcastle (UK)
1= Durham
3.   Liverpool
4.   George Washington
5.   University of Washington

Philosophy
Academic Survey
1. Oxford
2. Harvard
3. Cambridge
4. UC Berkeley
5. Princeton

Employer Survey
1. Cambridge
2. Harvard
3. Oxford
4. MIT
5. UC Berkeley

Citations per Paper
1. Brown
2. Melbourne
3. MIT
4= Rutgers
4= Zurich

Geography and Area Studies
Academic survey
1. UC Berkeley
2. Cambridge
3. Oxford
4. Harvard
5. Tokyo

Employer Survey
1. Harvard
2. Cambridge
3. Oxford
4. MIT
5. UC Berkeley

Citations per Paper
1. Stellenbosch
2. Lancaster
3. Durham'
4. Queen Mary London
5. University of Kansas

Linguistics
Academic Survey
1. Cambridge
2. Oxford
3. Harvard
4. UC Berkeley
5. Stanford

Employer Survey
1. Harvard
2. Oxford
3. MIT
4. UC Berkeley
5. Melbourne

Citations per Paper
1. Padua
2. Boston University
3. York University (UK)
4. Princeton
5. Harvard

2011-05-31T10:51:00.000+08:00

Asia: Japan Falling, Korea and China Rising

See my article on the QS Asian Rankings 2011 in University World News

2011-05-18T12:10:00.001+08:00

The QS Life Sciences Ranking Continued

Looking at the scores for the three indicators, academic survey, employer survey and citations per paper, we find the situation is similar to that of the engineering rankings released last month. There is a reasonably high correlation between the scores for the two surveys:

Medicine                    .720
Biological Sciences .747
Psychology                .570

The correlations between the score for citations per paper and the academic survey are low but still significant:
Medicine    .290
Biological Sciences .177
Psychology       .217

The correlations between the indicator citations and the employer survey are low or very low and insignificant:
Medicine               .129
Biological Sciences              .015
Psychology -027

Looking at the top five universities for each indicator, there are no surprises as far as the surveys are concerned but some of the universities in the top five for citations do cause some eyebrow raising. Arizona State university? University of Cinncinati? Tokyo Metropolitan University? Perhaps these are hitherto unnoticed pockets of excellence of the Alexandrian kind?

Top Five in Medicine

Academic Survey

1.    Harvard
2.    Cambridge
3.    Oxford
4.    Stanford
5.    Yale

Employer Survey

1. Harvard
2.     Cambridge
3.     Oxford
4.   MIT
5.     Stanford

Citations per Paper

1.    MIT
2.    Rockefeller University
3.    Caltech
4.    The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
5.     Harvard

Top Five in Biological Sciences

Academic Survey

1.    Cambridge
2.    Harvard
3.    UC Berkeley
4.    Oxford
5. MIT

Employer Survey

1. Harvard
2. Cambridge
3. MIT
4. Oxford
5. Stanford

Citations per Paper

1. Arizona State university
2.   Tokyo Metropolitan University
3.   MIT
4. Rockefeller University
5.   Harvard

Top Five in Psychology

Academic Survey

1.    Harvard
2.   Stanford
3.    UC Berkeley
4.    Cambridge
5.    Oxford

Employer Survey

1.     Cambridge
2.     Harvard
3.     Oxford
4.     Stanford
5.     UC Berkeley

Citations per Paper

1. UC Irvine
2. Emory
3.     Unuversity of Cinncinati
4.     Princeton
5.     Dartmouth College

2011-05-07T06:56:00.001+08:00

Inappropriate Analogy Watch

Times Higher Education of April 21st has a rather disconcerting cover, a close up picture of a bonobo ape. Inside there is a long article by a graduate student at the University of British Columbia that argues that humans may have been too hasty in assuming that their current aggressive behavior is rooted in their ancestry. He suggests that humanity is more closely related to the bonobos than to the common chimpanzees. The former are peaceful, promiscuous, egalitarian, dominated by females and without hang ups about homosexuality. They sound rather like a mix between a hippie commune and a humanities faculty at an American state university or least like those places would imagine themselves to be. Common chimpanzees on the other hand are notorious for behaving like a gang of skinheads on a Saturday night.

This is a variant of a common theme in popularized social science writing. For a long time, western feminists and leftists have looked to contemporary or historical pre-modern societies for validation only to find disappointment. Margaret Mead’s free loving Samoans tuned out to be rather different while the search for mother earth worshipping matriarchies has been equally futile. Now, it seems they are forced to go back several million years. Perhaps the bonobo really are what primatologists say they are. But it would be unsurprising if they turn out to be as politically incorrect, competitive and unpleasant as the chimpanzees.

In any case, it is pseudo-science to suggest that humanity can take any other species as a model or inspiration . There are dozens of extinct species and subspecies between us and the bonobos who may have been even more gentle and promiscuous than the bonobo or even more violent and competitive than the chimpanzee.

The point of the article is found in an editorial by Ann Mroz in the same issue.

In higher education, we appear to moving from an approach based on cooperation to one based on competition, from the bonobo compact to the chimp reforms, if you like. The Browne Review launches us into a quasi-market world, which in itself has far-reaching implications. Unfortunately, it comes on top of a range of pre-existing and co-existing factors: the concentration of research funding; tighter immigration rules; cuts in teacher training and NHS cash; and internationalisation.

Some post-1992 institutions facing immediate financial constraints are moving swiftly to deal with their problems. London Metropolitan University, for example, is cutting about 400 of its 557 degree courses, and the University of East London is planning to axe its School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Staff at the former institution describe the move as "an attempted reversal of widening participation...of everything that London Met...came into existence to promote". Staff at the latter describe its social sciences and humanities as high-performing areas. "Are UEL's non-traditional students going to be denied an academic education on the basis of managers' assumption that all such students are good for - and will be willing to pay for - is training?" they ask.

She therefore concludes.

universities have survived for 800 years through successful evolution in a relatively stable habitat, a context they share with the cooperative bonobo. The competitive chimpanzee, however, has had to adapt to more hostile conditions. In shaping the next stage of its evolution, the academy has the choice of emulating either the aggressive ape or the better angels of our nature.

There is a problem with this. The bonobo are close to extinction. There are only 10,000 of them left, compared with 300,000 common chimpanzees and the only reason those 10,000 have survived is that they are separated by the Congo river from the chimpanzees.

If Ann Mroz thinks British universities have evolved though cooperation over 800 years she should start by reading the novels of C. P. Snow. No doubt they have become thoroughly cooperative over the last few years as diversity workshops, collaborative projects, performance appraisals, quality audits and professional development seminars have eradicted most signs of individuality in their faculty.

But there is no Congo river separating British universities from all those nerds and buffs in Korea, China and Singapore who work 80 hours a week and refuse to cooperate and are quite uninterested in diversity, safe and comfortable environments and collegiality.

And just what is so bad about training?

2011-05-04T23:01:00.000+08:00

New QS Rankings

QS have just released their Life Sciences rankings based on their employer and academic surveys and citations per paper.

Here are the top five for medicine, biology and psychology.

Medicine

1. Harvard
2. Cambridge
3. MIT
4. Oxford
5. Stanford

Biological Sciences

1. Harvard
2. MIT
3. Cambridge
4. Oxford
5. Stanford

Psychology

1. Harvard
2. Cambridge
3. Stanford
4. Oxford
5. UC Berkeley

2011-05-02T20:21:00.004+08:00

Rising and Falling in Asia-Pacific

One problem with most international rankings is that they tend to measure historical quality and are not much use for predicting what will happen in the near future. The Shanghai rankings' alumni and awards criteria allow Oxbridge and some German universities to live off intellectual capital generated decades ago. The surveys of the QS rankings inevitably favour big, old, wealthy universities with years of alumni and endowments behind them. It will take a long time for any rapidly developing school to score well on the eleven year criteria in the HEEACT rankings.

I have compiled a list of the percentage change in the number of publications in ISI databases of universities in the Asia Pacific region between 2009 and 2010. The ranking includes all the universities listed in the 2009 Shanghai ARWU from the Asia Pacific region.

King Saud University is at the top of the table, almost doubling its output of papers between 2009 and 2010. Six out of the top 10 are from Greater China. Some major Japanese universities seem to be shrinking and Israel and Australia do not seem to be doing very well.

Some caveats. This is basically a measure of quantity not quality of research. Also, the results may reflect organisational changes such as the acquisition or loss of a medical school. The data were collected over several weeks, during which there could be additions to the databases so the scores were rounded out to whole numbers.

Percentage change in publications in the ISI Databases, 2009-2010

1.   King Saud University, Saudi Arabia, 95
2.   Shandong University, China, 16
3.   National Yang Ming University, Taiwan 15
4.   Tainjin University, China, 13
5.   Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 13
6. Sun Yat Sen University, China,   11
7.    Fudan University, China, 10
8.    Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand 9
9.    Niigata University,  Japan, 9
10. Gunma University, Japan, 9
11. Nihon University, Japan, 9
12.  University of Tasmania,  Australia, 9
13. Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Japan, 8
14. Jilin University, China, 8
15. Chang Gung University, Taiwan, 7
16. Chinese University of Hong Kong, 7
17. Massey University of New Zealand, 7
18.  University of Auckland, New Zealand, 6
19. Deakin University, Australia, 6
20. La Trobe University, Australia, 6
21. Seoul National University, Korea, 6
22.  Nanjing University, China, 6
23. Nankai University, Japan, 6
24   University of Canterbury, New Zealand, 6
25. Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, 6
26. Weizman Institute of Science, Israel, 6
27. Kumamoto University, Japan, 6
28. Osaka Prefecture University, Japan, 5
29. Yonsei University, Korea, 4
30. Peking University, China, 4
31.  University of Haifa, Israel, 4
32. Lanzhou University, China, 3
33. James Cook University, Australia, 3
34. Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 3
35.  University of Hong Kong, 3
36.  University of Queensland, Australia, 3
37. China Agricultural University, 3
38. Curtin University of Technology, Australia, 3
39.  University of Otago, New Zealand, 3
40. Kyungpook National University, Korea, 3
41. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 2
42. Sichuan University, China, 3
43. Korea University, 2
44.   University of Adelaide, Australia, 2
45.   Dalian University of Technology, China, 2
46.   Macquarie University, Australia, 2
47.   Sunkyunkwan University, Korea, 2
48.   Pusan National University, Korea, 1
49.   Flinders University, Australia, 1
50.   Shanghai Jiao Tung University, China, 1
51.   University of New South Wales, Australia, 1
52.   National Taiwan University, 1
53.   Osaka City University, Japan, 1
54.   Monash University, Astralia, 0
55.   Gifu University, Japan, 0
56.   Tsinghua University, China, -1
57.  Hiroshima University, Japan, -1
58.  Zhejiang University, China, -1
59. Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea, -1
60. Bar Ilan University, Israel, -1
61. National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, -1
62.  Kobe University, Japan,-1
63. University of Tehran, Iran, -1
64. University of Western Australia, -2
65.  University of Western Sydney, Australia, -2
66. National Tsinghua University, Taiwan, -2
67.  National University of Singapore, -2
68. Harbin Institute of Technology, China, -2
69. Kanazawa University, Japan, -3
70. City University of Hong Kong, -3
71.  University of Tokushima, Japan, -4
72.  University of Newcastle, Australia -4
73.  University of Melbourne, Australia. -4
74. Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, -4
75.  Indian Institute of Science,  - 4
76. Osaka University, Japan, -4
77. Kyushu Uniersity, Japan, -4
78.  University of Wollongong, Australia, -4
79. Hokkaido University, Japan, -5
80. Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, -5
81.  University of Tsukuba, Japan, -5
82.  University of Tokyo, Japan, -5
83. Yamaguchi University, Japan, -5
84. Hanyang University, Korea, -6
85. Hong Kong university of Science and Technlogy, -6
86. Technion - Israel Institute of Technology,   -6
87.   Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, -6
88.   Nagasaki  University,  Japan, -6
89.   Kyoto University, Japan, -6
90.   Chiba University, Japan, -6
91.   Australian National University, -6
92. Kagoshima University, Japan, -7
93.   Tel Aviv University, Israel. -7
94. Nagoya University, Japan, -7
95.   National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, -8
97.   Keio University, Japan, -8
98.   Okayama University, Japan, -8
99.    National Central University, Taiwan, -9
100.  Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan,-9
101.  Ehime University, Japan, -10
102. Tohoku University, Japan, -10
103.  Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, -10
104. Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, -13

2011-05-01T10:28:00.000+08:00

Queen's Will be Ranked This Year

A bit of good news for Times Higher Education. Queen's University, Canada, has decided to take part in this year's THE World University Rankings.

'Rankings methodologies had come under scrutiny in recent years. Some universities including Queen’s were concerned that inconsistent criteria and data used for comparing institutions did not accurately reflect their objectives, and some have participated in rankings selectively or not at all.
Last year, Queen’s decided not to submit information to the Times Higher Education ranking because of concerns about its methodology. As a result, Queen’s was not included in the Top 200 list. The Times [sic] has since changed its methodology.

“Queen’s is still concerned because the rankings focus mainly on research volume and intensity, and although Queen’s is one of Canada’s top research universities, our quality undergraduate student experience and out-of- classroom experience are not fully captured,” says Chris Conway, Director, Institutional Research and Planning. “This just means we need to work hard to tell the other side of our story – that we’re a balanced academy, excelling in both research and the student experience.” '

The implication that Queen's has decided to take part this year because of a change in methodology is difficult to accept. THE has talked about revising their citations indicator but nothing definite has emerged. The real reason might be this:

'Although both global and domestic rankings struggle with standardizing data collection and interpretation, they provide one of the few tools available to prospective undergraduate students and their families for evaluating universities.

“With so many options, rankings help to reassure parents and students about their decision to attend a given university,” says Andrea MacIntyre, the university’s international admission manager.
Queen’s position in rankings is one of the top three concerns among prospective undergraduate students, particularly in China and India, where the national education systems focus heavily on class standings from the early stages of education.'

2011-04-30T19:37:00.000+08:00

300: The Iranian Version

I have always thought that university ranking organisations are unimaginative in their choice of names. Surely they could do better than ARWU, WUR and HEEACT? I admit though that SCIMAGO sounds a bit better. What about renaming one of the tables the Comparative Ranking of Academic Performance?

For a moment, when reading the text below, I thought QS had come with a slightly more interesting name for their rankings, SUE, but it is, it seems, just the QS WUR somewhat mutated by translation in and out of Farsi.

"QS World University Ranking asks head of ISC (Islamic World Science Citation Center) for cooperation in electing high ranked universities of the world.

IBNA: According to the public relations of ISC, each year the QS World University Ranking releases the list of top world universities and for the year 2011, Dr Jafar Mehrad is asked for cooperation in electing high-ranked universities.

Meanwhile, ten out of total state and non-state Iranian universities and 30 universities from Asia and the Middle East are to be sorted in this election according to the criteria of this ranking system.

For the election of top world universities, 300 experts are annually invited and this year Dr Jafar Mehrad is one of the jurors.
The results of QS World University ranking will be released in autumn 2011. "

I wonder where the bit about 300 jurors came from.

2011-04-22T14:46:00.000+08:00

Worth Reading

Retraction Watch is a blog that deals with the retraction of scientific papers because of plagiarism, duplication, fabrication of data and so on.