What Happened to Cardiff?

The Malaysian Star (print edition 16/12/07, E11) has a feature on Brian Smith, Vice-Chancellor of Cardiff University from 1993 to 2001. (The Star reports that he was appointed in 2001)

Professor Smith is reputed to have revitalised the research capability of Cardiff . According to the Star:

Said Prof Smith: “Cardiff offered a fantastic opportunity.

“Here was a university that had been through very difficult times; it was the perfect opportunity to try out my theories.

“And they worked because the people at Cardiff were ready for change and ready to change dramatically.”

The main problem faced by the university at that time was that it had not yet re-established itself as a research university.

According to Prof Smith, there are a number of factors involved in the move to regain a university's research strength.

“A very big factor is research staff.

“Because British universities have a great deal of autonomy and flexibility, we were able to go out and recruit.”

And that was how Prof Sir Martin Evans, one of this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine recipients, came to join the university.

“He came to a department that was not strong but actually managed to increase its number of publications in top journals 11-fold,” said Prof Smith.

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Asked how he managed to attract top people like Prof Evans to join him at Cardiff, Prof Smith said he believed what counted was not just a lucrative contract but the whole package.

“I don't think it's entirely about money. I feel that Prof Evans was equally attracted by the opportunity to unify the entire biology department and direct its vision,” he observed.

To encourage productivity, Prof Smith switched the promotion system from a quota-based system (where the total number of professorial positions in a faculty were pre-determined) to a performance-based one.

He even offered an attractive retirement package to faculty members who were not producing much research.

However, in order for universities to be able to do that, Prof Smith said they need autonomy.

“The university has to be free to offer different contracts (to academics and scientists).

“And within the university, a lot of power needs to be devolved to the young people.

“It's all about having decisions taken at the lowest level practicable.

“That’s a major change,” he said.

The article proceeds:

Due in large part to these strategies, Cardiff has risen from a ranking of 241 in the THES-QS World University Rankings in 2005 to 99 this year.

It may well be true that Cardiff researchers became more productive because of Professor Smith's policies. A quick look at the Scopus database indicates that from 1997 to 2007 the total output of research papers rose three fold.

It is also undeniable that Cardiff rose to 99th place in the THES-QS rankings this year.


It does not, however, follow that those two facts had anything to do with each other. For a start, one wonders why the rankings should detect the improvement in research only in 2007 and not in 2005 or 2006.

What really happened?

In 2006 Cardiff scored reasonably well on the "peer review" (151th out of the overall top 400 universities), employer review (91st), student faculty ratio (111th), international faculty (116th), international students (111th) but miserably on citations per faculty (253th).

In 2007 Cardiff did better on the "peer review", rising to 129th but worse on the employer review , falling to 250th. The other criteria were pretty much the same: 138th for student faculty ratio, 106th for international faculty, 110th for international students and 269th for citations per faculty.

It seems that Cardiff's remarkable improvement between 2006 and 2007 resulted from getting many more points for citations, 65 in 2007 as against 6 in 2006. This is far greater than any improvement resulting from a new database and is almost certainly caused by the introduction of Z scores this year.

What happened was that in 2006 Cardiff was doing OK on most measures but badly on research. In 2007 it was still doing OK on most measures , except for the employer review, and still doing badly for research. But in 2007 because of the smoothing of the curve, it got a lot more points for the limited amount of research that it did.

The rise of Cardiff is largely an illusion created by a change in method.