The Uses of Ranking


Imperial College London has announced that the Principal of its Faculty of Medicine has been appointed to a joint position as Principal of the Faculty of Medicine and Chief Executive of the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

The report notes that Imperial College "is ranked fourth in the world for biomedical research in the Times Higher Education Supplement world university rankings".

It does not note that, according to the THES's own data on citations per paper for medical research, the college is ranked 28th. Nor that according to the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings it is ranked 25th for clinical medicine and pharmacy.

Nor that the survey that produced the fouth place ranking used a database provided by a publishing company with close ties to Imperial and that the data on research was collected by a company headed by a former faculty member.