Showing posts sorted by date for query MEPhi. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query MEPhi. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Going Up and Up Down Under: the Case of the University of Canberra

It is a fact almost universally ignored that when a university suddenly rises or falls many places in the global rankings the cause is not transformative leadership, inclusive excellence, team work, or strategic planning but nearly always a defect or a change in the rankers' methodology.

Let's take a look at the fortunes of the University of Canberra (UC) which THE world rankings now have in the world's top 200 universities and Australia's top ten. This is a remarkable achievement since the university did not appear in these rankings until 2015-16 when it was placed in the 500-600 band with very modest scores of 18.4 for teaching, 19.3 for research, 29.8 for citations, which is supposed to measure research impact, 36.2 for industry income, and 54.6 for international outlook.

Just four years later the indicator scores are 25.2 for teaching, 31.1 for research, 99.2 for citations, 38.6 for industry income, and 86.9 for international orientation. 

The increase in the overall score over four years, calculated with different weightings for the indicators, was composed of 20.8 points for citations and 6.3 for the other four indicators combined. Without those 20.8 points Canberra would be in the 601-800 band.

I will look at where that massive citation score came from in a moment. 

It seems that the Australian media is reporting on this superficially impressive performance with little or no scepticism and without noting how different it is from the other global rankings. 

The university has issued a statement quoting vice-chancellor Professor Deep Saini as saying that the "result confirms the steady strengthening of the quality at the University of Canberra, thanks to the outstanding work of our research, teaching and professional staff" and that the "increase in citation impact is indicative of the quality of research undertaken at the university, coupled with a rapid growth in influence and reach, and has positioned the university as amongst the best in the world."

The Canberra Times reports that the vice-chancellor has said  that part of the improvement was the result of a talent acquisition campaign while noting that many faculty were complaining about pressure and excessive workloads.

Leigh Sullivan, DVC for research and innovation, has a piece in the Campus Morning Mail that hints at reservations about UC's apparent success, which is " a direct result of its Research Foundation Plan (2013-2017) and "a strong emphasis on providing strategic support for research excellence in a few select research areas where UC has strong capability." He notes that when the citation scores of research stars are excluded there has still been a significant increase in citations and warns that what goes up can go down and that performance can be affected by changes in the ranking methodology.

The website riotact quotes the vice-chancellor on the improvement in research quality as evidence by the citation score and as calling for more funding for universities: the "government has to really think and look hard at how well we support our universities. That's not to say it badly supports us, it's that the university sector deserves to be on the radar of our government as a major national asset."

The impressive ascent of UC is unique to THE. No serious ranking puts it in the top 200 or anywhere near. In the current Shanghai Rankings it is in the 601-700 band and has been falling for the last two years. In Webometrics it is 730th in the world and 947th for Excellence, that is publications in the 10% most cited in 25 disciplines.  In  University Ranking by Academic Performance it is 899th and in the CWUR Rankings it doesn't even make the top 1,000.

Round University Ranking and Leiden Ranking do not rank UC at all.

Apart from THE UC does best in the QS rankings where it is 484th in the world and 26th in Australia.

So how could UC perform so brilliantly in THE rankings when nobody else has recognised that brilliance? What does THE know that nobody else does? Actually, it does not perform brilliantly in the THE rankings, just in the citations indicator which is supposed to measure research influence or research impact.

This year UC has a score of 99.2 which puts it in the top twenty for citations just behind Nova Southeastern University in Florida and Cankaya University in Turkey and ahead of Harvard, Princeton and Oxford. The top university this year is Aswan University in Egypt replacing Babol Noshirvani University of Technology in Iran. 

No, THE is not copying the interesting methodology of the Fortunate 500. This is the result of an absurd methodology that THE is unable or unwilling for some reason to change.

THE has a self-inflicted  problem with  a small number of papers that have hundreds or thousands of "authors" and collect thousands of citations. Some of these are from the CERN project and THE has dealt with them  by using a modified form of fractional counting for papers with more than a thousand authors. That has removed the privilege of institutions that contribut to CERN projects but has replaced it with the privilege of those that contribute to the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBDS) whose papers tend to have hundreds but not thousands of contributors and sometimes receive over a thousand citations. As a result, places like Tokyo Metropolitan University, National Research University MEPhI and Royal Holloway London have been replaced as citation super stars by St Georges' London, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, and Oregon Health and Science University.

It would be a simple matter to apply fractional counting to all papers, dividing the number of citations by the number of authors. After all Leiden Ranking and Nature Index manage to do it but THE for some reason has chosen not to follow.

The problem is compounded by counting self-citations, by hyper-normalisation so that the chances of hitting the jackpot with an unusually highly cited paper are increased, and by the country bonus that boosts the scores for universities by virtue of their location in low scoring countries. 

And so to UC's apparent success this year. This is entirely the result of it's citation score which is entirely dependent on THE's methodology. 

Between 2014 and 2018 UC had 3,825 articles in the Scopus database of which 27 were linked to the GBDS which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Those 27 articles, each with hundreds of contributors, have received 18,431 citations all of which are credited to UC and its contributor. The total number of citations is 53,929 so those 27 articles accounted for over a third of UC's citations. Their impact might be even greater if they were cited disproportionately soon after publication.

UC has of course improved its citation performance even without those articles but it is clear that they have made an outsize contribution. UC is not alone here. Many universities in the top 100 for citations in the THE world rankings owe their status to the GBDS: Anglia Ruskin, Reykjavik, Aswan, Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, the University of Peradeniya, Desarrollo, Pontifical Javeriana and so on.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the GBDS nor with UC encouraging researchers to take part. The problem lies with THE and its reluctance to repair an indicator that produces serious distortions and is an embarrassment to those universities who apparently look to the THE rankings to validate their status.

Monday, October 29, 2018

Is THE going to reform its methodology?


An article by Duncan Ross in Times Higher Education (THE) suggests that the World University Rankings are due for repair and maintenance. He notes that these rankings were originally aimed at a select group of research orientated world class universities but THE is now looking at a much larger group that is likely to be less internationally orientated, less research based and more concerned with teaching.

He says that it is unlikely that there will be major changes in the methodology for the 2019-20 rankings next year but after that there may be significant adjustment.

There is a chance that  the industry income indicator, income from industry and commerce divided by the number of faculty, will be changed. This is an indirect attempt to capture innovation and is unreliable since it is based entirely on data submitted by institutions. Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates has pointed out some problems with this indicator.

Ross seems most concerned, however, with the citations indicator which at present is normalised by field, of which there are over 300, type of publication and year of publication. Universities are rated not according to the number of citations they receive but by comparison with the world average of citations to documents of a specific type in a specific field in a specific year. There are potentially over 8,000 boxes into which any single citation could be dropped for comparison.

Apart from anything else, this has resulted in a serious reduction in transparency. Checking on the scores for Highly Cited Researchers or Nobel and fields laureates in the Shanghai rankings can be done in few minutes. Try comparing thousands of world averages with the citation scores of a university.

This methodology has produced a series of bizarre results, noted several times in this blog. I hope I will be forgiven for yet again listing some of the research impact superstars that THE has identified over the last few years: Alexandria University, Moscow Nuclear Research University MEPhI, Anglia Ruskin University, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, St George's University of London, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Federico Santa Maria Technical University, Florida Institute of Technology, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Oregon Health and Science University, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University.

The problems of this indicator go further than just a collection of quirky anomalies. It now accords a big privilege to medical research as it once did to fundamental physics research. It offers a quick route to ranking glory by recruiting highly cited researchers in strategic fields and introduces a significant element of instability into the rankings.

So here are some suggestions for THE should it actually get round to revamping the citations indicator.

1. The number of universities around the world that do a modest amount of  research of any kind is relatively small, maybe five or six thousand. The number that can reasonably claim to have a significant global impact is much smaller, perhaps two or three hundred. Normalised citations are perhaps a reasonable way of distinguishing among the latter, but pointless or counterproductive when assessing the former. The current THE methodology might be able to tell whether  a definitive literary biography by a Yale scholar has the same impact in its field as cutting edge research in particle physics at MIT but it is of little use in assessing the relative research output of mid-level universities in South Asia or Latin America.

THE should therefore consider reducing the weighting of citations to the same as research output or lower.

2.  A major cause of problems with the citations indicator is the failure to introduce complete fractional counting, that is distributing credit for citations proportionately among authors or institutions. At the moment THE counts every author of a paper with less than a thousand authors as though each of them were the sole author of the paper. As a result, medical schools that produce papers with hundreds of authors now have a privileged position in the THE rankings, something that the use of normalisation was supposed to prevent.

THE has introduced a moderate form of fractional counting for papers with over a thousand authors but evidently this is not enough.

It seems that some, rankers do not like fractional counting because it might discourage collaboration. I would not dispute that collaboration might be a good thing, although it is often favoured by institutions that cannot do very well by themselves, but this is not sufficient reason to allow distortions like those noted above to flourish.

3. THE have a country bonus or regional modification which divides a university's citation impact score by the square root of the score of the country in which the university is located. This was supposed to compensate for the lacking of funding and networks that afflicts some countries, which apparently does not affect their reputation scores or publications output. The effect of this bonus is to give some universities a boost derived not from their excellence but from the mediocrity or worse of their compatriots. THE reduced the coverage of this bonus to fifty percent of the indicator in 2015.  It might well be time to get rid of it altogether

4. Although QS stopped counting self-citations in 2011 THE continue to do so. They have said that overall they make little difference. Perhaps, but as the rankings expand to include more and more universities it will become more likely that a self-citer or mutual-citer will propel undistinguished  schools up the charts. There could be more cases like Alexandria University or Veltech University.

5. THE needs to think about what they are using citations to measure. Are they trying to assess research quality in which they case they should use citations per papers? Are they trying to estimate overall research impact in which case the appropriate metric would be total citations.

6. Normalisation by field and document type might be helpful for making fine distinctions among elite research universities but lower down it creates or contributes to serious problems when a single document or an unusually productive author can cause massive distortions. Three hundred plus fields may be too many and THE should think about reducing the number of fields. 

7. There has been a proliferation in recent years In the number of secondary affiliations. No doubt most of these are making a genuine contribution to the life of both or all of the universities with which they are affiliated. There is, however, a possibility of serious abuse if the practice continues. It would be greatly to THE's credit if they could find some way of omitting or reducing the weighting of secondary affiliations. 

8. THE are talking about different models of excellence. Perhaps they could look at the Asiaweek rankings which had a separate table for technological universities or Maclean's with its separate rankings for doctoral/medical universities and primarily undergraduate schools. Different weightings could be given to citations for each of these categories.

Saturday, August 11, 2018

Will THE do something about the citations indicator?


International university rankings can be a bit boring sometimes. It is difficult to get excited about the Shanghai rankings, especially at the upper end: Chicago down two places, Peking up one. There was a bit of excitement in 2014 when there was a switch to a new list of highly cited researchers and some universities went up and down a few places, or even a few dozen, but that seems over with now.

The Times Higher Education (THE) world rankings are always fun to read, especially the citations indicator, which since 2010 has proclaimed a succession of unlikely places as having an outsize influence on the world of research: Alexandria University, Hong Kong Baptist University, Bilkent University, Royal Holloway University of London, National Research University MEPhi Moscow, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Federico Santa Maria Technical University Chile, St George's University of London, Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge, Babol Noshirvani University University of Technology Iran.

I wonder if the good and the great of the academic world ever feel uncomfortable about going to those prestigious THE summits while places like the above are deemed to be the equal for research impact or the superior of Chicago or Melbourne or Tsinghua. Do they even look at the indicator scores?

These remarkable results are not because of deliberate cheating but of THE's methodology. First, research documents are divided into 300 plus fields, five types of documents, and five years of publication, and then the world average number of citations (mean) is calculated for each type of publication in each field and in each year. Altogether there are 8000 "cells" with which the average of each university in the THE rankings is compared .

This means that if a university manages to get a few publications in a field where citations are typically low it could easily get a very high citations score. 

Added to this is a "regional modification" where the final citation impact score is divided by the square root of the score of the country in which the country is located. This results in most universities receiving an increased score which is very small for those in productive countries and very high for those in countries that generate few citations. The modification is now applied to half of the citations indicator score.

Then we have the problems of those famous kilo-author mega-cited papers. These are papers with dozens, scores, or hundreds of participating institutions and similar numbers of authors and citations. Until 2015 THE treated every author as as though they were the sole author of a paper, including those with thousands of authors. Then in 2015 they stopped counting papers with over a thousand authors and in 2016 they introduced a modified fractional counting of citations for papers with over thousand authors. Citations were distributed proportionally among the authors with a minimum allotment of five per cent.

There are problems with all of these procedures. Treating every  authors as as the sole author meant that a few places can get massive citation counts from taking part in one or two projects such as the CERN project or the global burden of disease study . On the other hand excluding mega papers is also not helpful since it omits some of the most significant current research.

The simplest solution would be fractional counting all around, just dividing the number of citations of all papers by the numbers of contributors or contributing institutions. This is the default option of Leiden Ranking and there seems no compelling reason why THE could not so.

There are some other issues that should be dealt with. One is the question of self-citation. This is probably not a widespread issue but it has caused problems on a couple of occasions.

Something else that THE might want to think about is the effect of the rise of in the number of authors with multiple affiliations. So far only one university has recruited large numbers of adjunct staff whose main function seems to be  listing the university as a secondary affiliation at the top of published papers but there could be more in the future. 

Of course, none of this would matter very much if the citations indicator were given a reasonable weighting of, say, five or ten percent but it has more weight than any other indicator -- the next is the research reputation survey with 18 %. A single mega-paper or even a few strategically placed citations in a low cited field can have a huge impact on a university's overallscore.

There are signs that THE is getting embarrassed at the bizarre effects of this indicator. Last year Phil Baty, THE's ranking editor,  spoke about its quirky results. 

Recently, Duncan Ross, data director at THE, has written about the possibility of of a methodological change. He notes that currently the  benchmark world score for the 8000 plus cells  is determined by the mean. He speculates about using the median instead. The problem with this is that a majority of papers are never cited so the median for many of the cells is going to be zero. So he proposes, based on an analysis from the recent THE Latin American rankings, that the 75th percentile be used. 

Ross suggests that this would make the THE rankings more stable, especially the Latin American rankings where the threshold number of articles is quite low. 

It would also allow the inclusion of more universities that currently fall below the threshold. This, I suspect, is something that is likely to appeal to the THE management.

It is very good that THE appears willing to think about reforming the citations indicator. But a bit of tweaking will not be enough. 





Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Comments on an Article by Brian Leiter

Global university rankings are now nearly a decade and a half old. The Shanghai rankings (Academic Ranking of World Universities or ARWU) began in 2003, followed a year later by Webometrics and the THES-QS rankings which, after an unpleasant divorce, became the Times Higher Education (THE) and the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) world rankings. Since then the number of rankings with a variety of audiences and methodologies has expanded.

We now have several research-based rankings, University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP) from Turkey, the National Taiwan University Rankings, Best Global Universities from US NewsLeiden Ranking, as well as rankings that include some attempt to assess and compare something other than research, the Round University Rankings from Russia and U-Multirank from the European Union. And, of course, we also have subject rankingsregional rankings, even age group rankings.

It is interesting that some of these rankings have developed beyond the original founders of global rankings. Leiden Ranking is now the gold standard for the analysis of publications and citations. The Russian rankings use the same Web of Science database that THE did until 2014 and it has 12 out of the 13 indicators used by THE plus another eight in a more sensible and transparent arrangement. However, both of these receive only a fraction of the attention given to the THE rankings.

The research rankings from Turkey and Taiwan are similar to the Shanghai rankings but without the elderly or long departed Fields and Nobel award winners and with a more coherent methodology. U-Multirank is almost alone in trying to get at things that might be of interest to prospective undergraduate students.

It is regrettable that an article by Professor Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago in the Chronicle of Higher Education , 'Academic Ethics: To Rank or Not to Rank' ignores such developments and mentions only the original “Big Three”, Shanghai, QS and THE. This is perhaps forgivable since the establishment media, including THE and the Chronicle, and leading state and academic bureaucrats have until recently paid very little attention to innovative developments in university ranking. Leiter attacks the QS rankings and proposes that they should be boycotted while trying to improve the THE rankings.

It is a little odd that Leiter should be so caustic, not entirely without justification, about QS while apparently being unaware of similar or greater problems with THE.

He begins by saying that QS stands for “quirky silliness”. I would not disagree with that although in recent years QS has been getting less silly. I have been as sarcastic as anyone about the failings of QS: see here and here for an amusing commentary.

But the suggestion that QS is uniquely bad in contrast to THE is way off the target. There are many issues with the QS methodology, especially with its employer and academic surveys, and it has often announced placings that seem very questionable such as Nanyang Technological University (NTU) ahead of Princeton and Yale or the University of Buenos Aires in the world top 100, largely as a result of a suspiciously good performance in the survey indicators. The oddities of the QS rankings are, however, no worse than some of the absurdities that THE has served up in their world and regional rankings.  We have had places like University of Marakkesh Cadi Ayyad University in Morocco, Middle East Technical University in Turkey, Federico Santa Maria Technical University in Chile, Alexandria University and Veltech University in India rise to ludicrously high places, sometimes just for a year or two, as the result of a few papers or even a single highly cited author.

I am not entirely persuaded that NTU deserves its top 12 placing in the QS rankings. You can see here QS’s unconvincing reply to a question that I provided. QS claims that NTU's excellence is shown by its success in attracting foreign faculty, students and collaborators, but when you are in a country where people show their passports to drive to the dentist, being international is no great accomplishment. Even so, it is evidently world class as far as engineering and computer science are concerned and it is not impossible that it could reach an undisputed overall top ten or twenty ranking the next decade.

While the THE top ten or twenty or even fifty looks quite reasonable, apart from Oxford in first place, there are many anomalies as soon as we start breaking the rankings apart by country or indicator and THE has pushed some very weird data in recent years. Look at these places supposed to be regional or international centers of across the board research excellence as measured by citations: St Georges University of London, Brandeis University, the Free University of Bozen-Bolsano,  King Abdulaziz University, the University of Iceland, Veltech University. If QS is silly what are we to call a ranking where Anglia Ruskin University is supposed to have a greater research impact than Chicago, Cambridge or Tsinghua.

Leiter starts his article by pointing out that the QS academic survey is largely driven by the geographical distribution of its respondents and by the halo effect. This is very probably true and to that I would add that a lot of the responses to academic surveys of this kind are likely driven by simple self interest, academics voting for their alma mater or current employer. QS does not allow respondents to vote for the latter but they can vote for the former and also vote for grant providers or collaborators.

He says that “QS does not, however, disclose the geographic distribution of its survey respondents, so the extent of the distorting effect cannot be determined". This is not true of the overall survey. QS does in fact give very detailed figures about the origin of its respondents and there is good evidence here of probable distorting effects. There are, for example, more responses from Taiwan than from Mainland China, and almost as many from Malaysia as from Russia. QS does not, however, go down to subject level when listing geographic distribution.

He then refers to the case of University College Cork (UCC) asking faculty to solicit friends in other institutions to vote for UCC. This is definitely a bad practice, but it was in violation of QS guidelines and QS have investigated. I do not know what came of the investigation but it is worth noting that the message would not have been an issue if it had referred to the THE survey.

On balance, I would agree that THE ‘s survey methodology is less dubious than QS’s and less likely to be influenced by energetic PR campaigns. It would certainly be a good idea if the weighting of the QS survey was reduced and if there was more rigorous screening and classification of potential respondents.

But I think we also have to bear in mind that QS does prohibit respondents from voting for their own universities and it does average results out over a five- year period (formerly three years).

It is interesting that while THE does not usually combine and average survey results it did so in the 2016-17 world rankings combining the 2015 and 2016 survey results. This was, I suspect, probably because of a substantial drop in 2016 in the percentage of respondents from the arts and humanities that would, if unadjusted, have caused a serious problem for UK universities, especially those in the Russell Group.

Leiter then goes on to condemn QS for its dubious business practices. He reports that THE dropped QS because of its dubious practices. That is what THE says but it is widely rumoured within the rankings industry that THE was also interested in the financial advantages of a direct partnership with Thomson Reuters rather than getting data from QS.

He also refers to QS’s hosting a series of “World Class events” where world university leaders pay $950 for “seminar, dinners, coffee breaks” and “learn best practice for branding and marketing your institution through case studies and expert knowledge” and the QS stars plan where universities pay to be audited by QS in return for stars that they can use for promotion and advertising. I would add to his criticism that the Stars program has apparently undergone a typical “grade inflation” with the number of five-star universities increasing all the time.

Also, QS offers specific consulting services and it has a large number of clients from around the world although there are many more from Australia and Indonesia than from Canada and the US. Of the three from the US one is MIT which has been number one in the QS world rankings since 2012, a position it probably achieved after a change in the way in which faculty were classified.

It would, however, be misleading to suggest that THE is any better in this respect. Since 2014 it has launched a serious and unapologetic “monetisation of data” program.

There are events such as the forthcoming world "academic summit" where for 1,199 GBP (standard university) or 2,200 GBP (corporate), delegates can get "Exclusive insight into the 2017 Times Higher Education World University Rankings at the official launch and rankings masterclass,”, plus “prestigious gala dinner, drinks reception and other networking events”. THE also provides a variety of benchmarking and performance analysis services, branding, advertising and reputation management campaigns and a range of silver and gold profiles, including adverts and sponsored supplements. THE’s data clients include some illustrious names like the National University of Singapore and Trinity College Dublin plus some less well-known places such as Federico Santa Maria Technical University, Orebro University, King Abdulaziz University, National Research Nuclear University MEPhI Moscow, and Charles Darwin University.

Among THE’s activities are regional events that promise “partnership opportunities for global thought leaders” and where rankings like “the WUR are presented at these events with our award-winning data team on hand to explain them, allowing institutions better understanding of their findings”.

At some of these summits the rankings presented are trimmed and tweaked and somehow the hosts emerge in a favourable light. In February 2015, for example, THE held a Middle East and North Africa (MENA) summit that included a “snapshot ranking” that put Texas A and M University Qatar, a branch campus that offers nothing but engineering courses, in first place and Qatar University in fourth. The ranking consisted of precisely one indicator out of the 13 that make up THE’s world university rankings, field and year normalised citations. United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) was 11th and the American University of Sharjah in the UAE 14th.  

The next MENA summit was held in January 2016 in Al Ain in UAE. There was no snapshot this time and the methodology for the MENA rankings included 13 indicators in THE’s world rankings. Host country universities were now in fifth (UAEU) and eighth place (American University in Sharjah). Texas A and M Qatar was not ranked and Qatar University fell to sixth place.

Something similar happened to Africa. In 2015, THE went to the University of Johannesburg for a summit that brought together “outstanding global thought leaders from industry, government, higher education and research” and which unveiled THE’s Africa ranking based on citations (with the innovation of fractional counting) that put the host university in ninth place and the University of Ghana in twelfth.

In 2016 the show moved on to the University of Ghana where another ranking was produced based on all the 13 world ranking indicators. This time the University of Johannesburg did not take part and the University of Ghana went from 12th place to 7th.

I may have missed something but so far I do not see sign of THE Africa or MENA summits planned for 2017. If so, then African and MENA university leaders are to be congratulated for a very healthy scepticism.

To be fair, THE does not seem to have done any methodological tweaking for this year’s Asian, Asia Pacific and Latin American rankings.

Leiter concludes that American academics should boycott the QS survey but not THE’s and that they should lobby THE to improve its survey practices. That, I suspect, is pretty much a nonstarter. QS has never had much a presence in the US anyway and THE is unlikely to change significantly as long as its commercial dominance goes unchallenged and as long as scholars and administrators fail to see through its PR wizardry. It would be better for everybody to start looking beyond the "Big Three" rankings.





Monday, May 29, 2017

Ten Universities with a Surprisingly Large Research Impact

Every so often newspapers produce lists of universities that excel in or are noteworthy for something. Here is a list of ten universities that, according to Times Higher Education (THE), have achieved remarkable success in the world of global research. In a time of austerity when the wells of patronage are running dry, they should be an example to us all: they have achieved a massive global research impact, measured by field-normalised citations, despite limited funding, minimal reputations and few or very few publications. The source is the THE World and Asian rankings citations indicator.

1. First on the list is Alexandria University in Egypt,  4th in the world and a near perfect score for research impact in 2010-11.

2. In the same year Hong Kong Baptist University was tenth for research impact, ahead of the University of Chicago and the University of Hong Kong.

3. In 2011-12 Royal Holloway, University of London, was in 12th place, ahead of any other British or European institution.

4. The National Research Nuclear University MEPhI, in Moscow, a specialist  institution, was top of the table for citations in 2012-13.

5. In 2013-14 and 2014-15 Tokyo Metropolitan University had a perfect score of 100 for citations, a distinction shared only with MIT.

6. In 2014-15 Federico Santa Maria Technical University was sixth in the world for research impact and first in Latin America with a near perfect score of 99.7.

7. In the same year Bogazici University in Turkey reached the top twenty for research impact.

8. St George's, University of London, was the top institution in the world for research impact in 2016-17.

9. In that year Anglia Ruskin University, a former art school, was tenth for this metric, equal to Oxford and well ahead of the other university in Cambridge.

10. Last year's THE Asian rankings saw Vel Tech University in Chennai achieve the highest impact of any Asian university. 

Sunday, September 11, 2016

Waiting for the THE world rankings



The world, having recovered from the shocks of the Shanghai, QS and RUR rankings, now waits for the THE world rankings, especially the research impact indicator measured by field normalised citations.

It might be helpful to show the top 5 universities for this criterion since 2010-11.

2010-11
1. Caltech
2. MIT
3. Princeton
4. Alexandria University
5. UC Santa Cruz

2011-12
1. Princeton
2. MIT
3. Caltech
4. UC Santa Barbara
5. Rice University

2012-13
1. Rice University
2. National Research Nuclear University MePhI
3. MIT
4. UC Santa Cruz
5. Princeton

2013-14
1. MIT
2. Tokyo Metropolitan University
3. Rice University
4. UC Santa Cruz
5. Caltech

2014-15
1. MIT
2. UC Santa Cruz
3. Tokyo Metropolitan University
4. Rice University
5. Caltech

2015-16
1. St George's, University of London
2. Stanford University
3. UC Santa Cruz
4  Caltech
5. Harvard

Notice that no university has been in the top five for citations in every year.

Last year THE introduced some changes to this indicator, one of which was to exclude papers with more than 1000 authors from the citation count. This, along with a dilution of the regional modification that gave a bonus to universities in low scoring countries, had a devastating effect on some universities in France, Korea, Japan, Morocco, Chile and Turkey.

The citations indicator has always been an embarrassment to THE, throwing up a number of improbable front runners aka previously undiscovered pockets of excellence. Last year they introduced some reforms but not enough. It would be a good idea for THE to get rid of the regional modification altogether, to introduce full scale fractional counting, to reduce the weighting assigned to citations, to exclude self-citations and secondary affiliations and to include more than one measure of research impact and research quality.

Excluding the papers, mainly in particle physics, with 1,000 plus "authors" meant avoiding the bizarre situation where a contributor to a single paper with 2,000 authors and 2,000 citations would get the same credit as 1,000 authors writing a thousand papers each of which had been cited twice.

But this measure also  meant that some of the most significant scientific activity of the century would not be counted in the rankings. The best solution would have been fractional counting, distributing the citations among all of the institutions or contributors, and in fact THE did this for their pilot African rankings at the University of Johannesburg.

Now, THE have announced a change for this year's rankings. According to their data chief Duncan Ross.

" Last year we excluded a small number of papers with more than 1,000 authors. I won’t rehearse the arguments for their exclusion here, but we said at the time that we would try to identify a way to re-include them that would prevent the distorting effect that they had on the overall metric for a few universities.


This year they are included – although they will be treated differently from other papers. Every university with researchers who author a kilo-author paper will receive at least 5 per cent credit for the paper – rising proportionally to the number of authors that the university has.
This is the first time that we have used a proportional measure in our citations score, and we will be monitoring it with interest.

We’re also pleased that this year the calculation of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings has been subject to independent audit by professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). "
This could have perverse consequences. If an institution has one contributor to a 1,000 author paper with 2,000 citations then that author will get 2,000 citations for the university. But if there are 1001 authors then he or she would get only 50 citations.

It is possible that we will see a cluster of papers with 998, 999, 1000 authors as institutions remove their researchers from the author lists or project leaders start capping the number of contributors.

This could be a way  of finding out if research intensive universities really do care about the THE rankings.

Similarly, QS now excludes papers with more than ten contributing institutions. If researchers are concerned about the QS rankings they will ensure that the number of institutions does not go above ten. Let's see if we start getting large numbers of papers with ten institutions but none or few with 11, 12 13 etc.

I am wondering why THE would bother introducing this relatively small change. Wouldn't it make more sense to introduce a lot of small changes all at once and get the resulting volatility over and done with?

I wonder if this has something to do with the THE world academic summit being held at Berkeley on 26-28 September in cooperation with UC Berkeley. Last year Berkeley fell from 8th to 13th in the THE world rankings. Since it is a contributor to several multi-contributor papers it is possible that the partial re-inclusion of hyper-papers will help the university back into the top ten.



Thursday, April 14, 2016

Are there any more rankings left?

There seems to be an unending stream of new rankings. So far we have had from the big three or four subject rankings, field rankings, European, Asian, African, Latin American, Middle East and North Africa rankings, BRICS rankings. BRICS and emerging economies rankings, reputation rankings, young universities, old universities, most international universities rankings, research income from industry rankings.

From outside the charmed triangle or square we have had random rankings, length of name rankings,green rankings, twitter and LinkedIn rankings and rich universities rankings and of course in the USA a mixed bag of best universities for squirrels, gay friendly, top party schools and so on. I am a keen follower of the latter: when the US Air Force Academy gets in the top ten I shall pack up and move to Antarctica.

So are there any more international university rankings in the pipeline?

A few suggestions. Commonwealth universities, OIC universities, cold universities, high universities (altitude that is), poor universities, fertile universities (measured by branch campuses).

One that would be fun to see would be a Research Impact ranking based on those universities that have achieved a top  placing in the THE year- and field- normalised, regionally modified, standardised, citations ranking.

Some notable inclusions would be St. George's University of London, Rice University, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Federico Santa Maria Technical University, Florida Institute of Technology, National Research Nuclear University MEPhI and Alexandria University.



Friday, November 13, 2015

Are global rankings losing their credibility? (from WONK HE)


Originally published in WONK HE 27/10/2015


Are global rankings losing their credibility?
Richard is an academic and expert on university rankings. He writes in depth on rankings at his blog: University Rankings Watch.
PUBLISHED
Oct 27th 2015
TAGS
·         Data
·         International
·         Rankings & League tables


The international university ranking scene has become increasingly complex, confusing and controversial. It also seems that the big name brands are having problems balancing popularity with reliability and validity. All this is apparent from the events of the last two months which have seen the publication of several major rankings.
The first phase of the 2015 global ranking season ended with the publication of the US News’s (USN) Best Global universities. We have already seen the 2015 editions of the big three brand names, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) produced by the Centre for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings and the Times Higher Education (THEWorld University Rankings. Now a series of spin-offs has begun.
In addition, a Russian organisation, Round University Ranking (RUR), has produced another set of league tables. Apart from a news item on the website of the International Ranking Expert Group these rankings have received almost no attention outside Russia, Eastern Europe and the CIS. This is very unfortunate since they do almost everything that the other rankings do and contain information that the others do not.
One sign of the growing complexity of the ranking scene is that USN, QS, ARWU and THE are producing a variety of by-products including rankings of new universities, subject rankings, best cities for students, reputation rankings, regional rankings with no doubt more to come. They are also assessing more universities than ever before. THE used to take pride in ranking only a small elite group of world universities. Now they are talking about being open and inclusive and have ranked 800 universities this year, as did QS, while USN has expanded from 500 to 750 universities. Only the Shanghai rankers have remained content with a mere 500 universities in their general rankings.
Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)
All three of the brand name rankings have faced issues of credibility. The Shanghai ARWU has had a problem with the massive recruitment of adjunct faculty by King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah. This was initially aimed at the highly cited researchers indicator in the ARWU, which simply counts the number of researchers affiliated to universities no matter whether their affiliation has been for an academic lifetime or had begun the day before ARWU did the counting. The Shanghai rankers deftly dealt with this issue by simply not counting secondary affiliations in the new lists of highly cited researchers supplied by Thompson Reuters in 2014.
That, however, did not resolve the problem entirely. Those researchers have not stopped putting KAU as a secondary affiliation and even if they no longer affected the highly cited researchers indicator they could still help a lot with publications and papers in Nature and Science, both of which are counted in the ARWU. These part-timers – and some may not even be that – have already ensured that KAU, according to ARWU, is the top university in the world for publications in mathematics.
The issue of secondary affiliation is one that is likely to become a serious headache for rankers, academic publishers and databases in the next few years. Already, undergraduate teaching in American universities is dominated by a huge reserve army of adjuncts. It is not impossible that in the near future some universities may find it very easy to offer minimal part-time contracts to talented researchers in return for listing as an affiliation and then see a dramatic improvement in ranking performance.
ARWU’s problem with the highly cited researchers coincided with Thomson Reuters producing a new list and announcing that the old one would no longer be updated. Last year, Shanghai combined the old and new lists and this produced substantial changes for some universities. This year they continued with the two lists and there was relatively little movement in this indicator or in the overall rankings. But next year they will drop the old list altogether and just use the new one and there will be further volatility. ARWU have, however, listed the number of highly cited researchers in the old and new lists so most universities should be aware of what is coming.
Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings
The Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings have been regarded with disdain by many British and American academics although they do garner some respect in Asia and Latin America. Much of the criticism has been directed at the academic reputation survey which is complex, opaque and, judging from QS’s regular anti-gaming measures, susceptible to influence from universities. There have also been complaints about the staff student ratio indicator being a poor proxy for teaching quality and the bias of the citations per faculty indicator towards medicine and against engineering, the social sciences and the arts and humanities.
QS have decided to reform their citations indicator by treating the five large subject groups as contributing equally to the indicator score. In addition, QS omitted papers, most of them in physics, with a very large number of listed authors and averaged responses to the surveys over a period of five years in an attempt to make the rankings less volatile.
The result of all this was that some universities rose and others fell. Imperial College London went from 2nd to 8th while the London School of Economics rose from 71st to 35th. In Italy, the Polytechnics of Milan and Turin got a big boost while venerable universities suffered dramatic relegation. Two Indian institutions moved into the two hundred, some Irish universities such as Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and University College Cork went down and some such as National University of Ireland Galway and the University of Limerick went up.
There has always been a considerable amount of noise in these rankings resulting in part from small fluctuations in the employer and academic surveys. In the latest rankings these combined with methodological changes to produce some interesting fluctuations. Overall the general pattern was that universities that emphasise the social sciences, the humanities and engineering have improved at the expense of those that are strong in physics and medicine.
Perhaps the most remarkable of this year’s changes was the rise of two Singaporean universities, the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), to 12th and 13th place respectively, a change that has met with some scepticism even in Singapore. They are now above Yale, EPF Lausanne and King’s College London. While the changes to the citations component were significant, another important reason for the rise of these two universities was their continuing remarkable performance in the academic and employer surveys. NUS is in the top ten in the world for academic reputation and employer reputation with a perfect score of 100, presumably rounded up, in each. NTU is 52nd for the academic survey and 39th for employer with scores in the nineties for both.
Introducing a moderate degree of field normalisation was probably a smart move. QS were able to reduce the distortion resulting from the database’s bias to medical research without risking the multiplication of strange results that have plagued the THE citations indicator. They have not, however, attempted to reform the reputation surveys which continue to have a combined 50% weighting and until they do so these rankings are unlikely to achieve full recognition from the international academic community.
Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings
The latest THE world rankings were published on September 30th and like QS, THE have done some tweaking of their methodology. They had broken with Thompson Reuters at the end of 2014 and started using data from Scopus, while doing the analysis and processing in-house. They were able to analyse many more papers and citations and conduct a more representative survey of research and postgraduate supervision. In addition they omitted multi-author and multi-cited papers and reduced the impact of the “regional modification”.
Consequently there was a large dose of volatility. The results were so different from those of 2014 that they seemed to reflect an entirely new system. THE did, to their credit, do the decent thing and state that direct comparisons should not be made to previous years. That, however, did not stop scores of universities and countries around the world from announcing their success. Those that had suffered have for the most part kept quiet.
There were some remarkable changes. At the very top, Oxford and Cambridge surged ahead of Harvard which fell to sixth place. University College Dublin, in contrast to the QS rankings, rose as did Twente and Moscow State, the Karolinska Institute and ETH Zurich.
On the other hand, many universities in France, Korea, Japan and Turkey suffered dramatic falls. Some of those universities had been participants in the CERN projects and so had benefitted in 2014 from the huge number of citations derived from their papers. Some were small and produced few papers so those citations were divided by a small number of papers. Some were located in countries that performed poorly and so got help from a “regional modification” (the citation impact score of the university is divided by the square root of the average citation impact score of the whole country). Such places suffered badly from this year’s changes.
It is a relief that THE have finally done something about the citations indicator and it would be excellent if they continued with further reforms such as fractional counting, reducing the indicator’s overall weighting, not counting self-citations and secondary affiliations and getting rid of the regional modification altogether.
Unfortunately, if the current round of reforms represent an improvement, and on balance they probably do, then the very different results of 2014 and before, call into question THE’s repeated claims to be trusted, robust and sophisticated. If the University of Twente deserves to be in the top 150 this year then the 2014 rankings which had them outside the top 200 could not possibly be valid. If the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) fell 66 places then either the 2015 rankings or those of 2014 were inaccurate, or they both were. Unless there is some sort of major restructuring such as an amalgamation of specialist schools or the shedding of inconvenient junior colleges or branch campuses, large organisations like universities simply do not and cannot change that much over the course of 12 months or less.
It would have been more honest, although probably not commercially feasible, for THE to declare that they were starting with a completely new set of rankings and to renounce the 2009-14 rankings in the way that they had disowned the rankings produced in cooperation with QS between 2004 and 2008. THE seem to be trying to trade on the basis of their trusted methodology while selling results suggesting that that methodology is far from trustworthy. They are of course doing just what a business has to do. But that is no reason why university administrators and academic experts should be so tolerant of such a dubious product.
These rankings also contain quite a few small or specialised institutions that would appear to be on the borderline of a reasonable definition of an “independent university with a broad range of subjects”: Scuala Normale Superiore di Pisa and Scuala Superiore Sant’Anna, both part of the University of Pisa system, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, an affiliate of two universities, St George’s, University of London, a medical school, Copenhagen Business School, Rush university, the academic branch of a private hospital in Chicago, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and the National Research Nuclear University (MEPhI) in Moscow, specialising in physics. Even if THE have not been too loose about who is included, the high scores achieved by such narrowly focussed institutions calls the validity of the rankings into question.
Round University Rankings
In general the THE rankings have received a broad and respectful response from the international media and university managers, and criticism has largely been confined to outsiders and specialists. This is in marked contrast to the Rankings released by a Russian organisation early in September. These are based entirely on data supplied by Thompson Reuters, THE’s data provider and analyst until last year. They contain a total of 20 indicators, including 12 out of the 13 in the THE rankings. Unlike THE, RUR do not bundle indicators together in groups so it is possible to tell exactly why universities are performing well or badly.
The RUR rankings are not elegantly presented but the content is more transparent than THE, more comprehensive than QS, and apparently less volatile than either. It is a strong indictment of the international higher education establishment that these rankings are ignored while THE’s are followed so avidly.
Best Global Universities
The second edition of the US News’s Best Global Universities was published at the beginning of October. The US News is best known for the ranking of American colleges and universities and it has been cautious about venturing into the global arena. These rankings are fairly similar to the Shanghai ARWU, containing only research indicators and making no pretence to measure teaching or graduate quality. The methodology avoids some elementary mistakes. It does not give too much weight to any one indicator, with none getting more than 12.5%, and measures citations in three different ways. For eight indicators log manipulation was done before the calculation of z-scores to eliminate outliers and statistical anomalies.
This year US News went a little way towards reducing the rankers’ obsession with citations by including conferences and books in the list of criteria.
Since they do not include any non-research indicators these rankings are essentially competing with the Shanghai ARWU and it is possible that they may eventually become the first choice for internationally mobile graduate students.
But at the moment it seems that the traditional media and higher education establishment have lost none of their fascination for the snakes and ladders game of THE and QS.