Not What It used To Be

The THE-QS rankings seem to be getting better. So far this year, no outrageous errors like ranking a non existent university (Beijing University), turning Malaysian ethnic minorities into foreigners or giving Washington University in St Louis a near zero for research, have surfaced.

But comparing the scores for the academic survey with those for citations for research, both of which are supposed to measure research quality, suggests that the former has is a large and systematic bias.

Here is a list of universities whose score on the academic survey exceeds their score on the citations per faculty by forty points or more.

Mcgill
Sydney
Melbourne
New York University
Monash
Trinity College Dublin
Peking
Seoul National University
Tsinghua
Auckland
London School of Economics
Warwick
Nanyang Technological University Singapore
University College Dublin
Fudan
Humboldt University Berlin
Nanjing
Shanghai Jiao Tong
Aotonomous National University of Mexico
Chulalongkorn University Thailand
Waseda
Lomonosov State University Moscow
Bologna
Sao Paulo
Beunos Aires

Maybe LSE and NYU can be explained by excellence in subjects that produce few publications or citations. But is it not possible that there is a pronounced geographical bias in the survey?