Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) has just released their rankings for 2008. Compared to the THE-QS rankings, public response, especially in Asia and Australia, has been slight. This is largely because ascent and descent within the Shanghai index is minimal, a tribute to their reliability. In contrast, the THE-QS rankings, with their changes in methodology and frequent errors, arouse almost as much interest as a country's performance in the Olympics.
Still, it is instructive to check how well various universities do on the different components of the Shanghai rankings.
The current top ten are as follows:
1. Harvard
2. Stanford
3. Berkeley
4. Cambridge
5. MIT
6. Caltech
7. Columbia
8. Princeton
9. Chicago
10. Oxford
The Shanghai index includes two categories based on Nobel prizes and Fields medals. These measure the quality of research that might have been produced decades ago. Looking at the other criteria gives a rather different picture of current research.
It is interesting to see what happens to these ten if we rank them according to SJTU's PUB category, the total number of articles indexed in the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) in 2007. The SSCI gets a double weighting.
Harvard remains at number 1Stanford goes down to number 8
Berkeley goes down to 11
Cambridge goes down to 23
MIT is down at 34
Caltech tumbles to 86
Columbia is down just a bit at 10
Princeton crashes to 120
Chicago falls to 72
Oxford goes down to 18
If this category represents current research output then it looks as though some American universities and Oxbridge have entered a period of decline. Of course, Caltech and MIT may suffer from the PUB category including social science research but would that explain why Princeton and Chicago are now apparently producing a relatively small amount of research?
The top ten for PUB is
1. Harvard
2. Tokyo
3. Toronto
4. University of Michigan
5. UCLA
6. University of Washington
7. Stanford
8. Kyoto
9. Columbia
10. Berkeley
So how do you suggest that universities in the world should be ranked? It looks like SJTU is also flawed in some aspects.
ReplyDeleteI believe that employer's review should matter. The Ivies in the US are especially good because they send a massive amount of people into Wall Street. They just have a good reputation.
to be fair shouldn't these pub numbers be adjusted for the size of the institution?
ReplyDeleteComparatively speaking, Caltech is small.
The criterion of using Nobel prizes and Fields index does disadvantge newer Universities and those outside American and Western Europe where winning Nobel prizes isn't so much a rave until recent decade or so.
ReplyDeleteI am not going into how Nobel criterion itself disadvantages Non American/(Western) European academia.
Putting something there which might have been won 2 decades ago, and where the prize winner might have passed on, is another of my gripe. But generally, I take this ranking as a good guide.
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