Something from THE

An editorial by Phil Baty in Times Higher Education refers to a comment by Janez Potocnik, former European Commissioner for science and research, that university rankings are now used to assess national economic strength.

He then goes on to indicate other uses of rankings and to provide some more information about the forthcoming THE rankings. It seems that universities will be ranked in six subject areas, one more than in the THE-QS rankings, with life sciences and biomedicine being divided into life sciences and "clinical, pre-clinical and health".

Also "(w)e will also judge subject strength on the full range of measures used in the overall table. We believe this will represent another great improvement."

There might be a problem here. If THE are going to publish subject rankings based on the indicators used in the overall rankings it would not make sense to use the proportions of international students and international faculty, student faculty ratios or citations per faculty for the whole university to determine standing in specific disciplinary areas. So, Thomson Reuters would have to collect specific data about the numbers of international students in the social sciences and so on. Getting accurate information about numbers of students and faculty is diffcult enough for a university as a whole but for each disciplinary area it would be close to impossible. In any case, in many universities the boundaries between disciplinary areas may not correspond to those used by Thomson Reuters.

The reference to ranking the top 200 universities is disappointing. There is an enormous unmet demand for valid information about universities around the world, not just the top 200. Thomson Reuters say they are collecting information about a thousand universities (down from "thousands" a few weeks ago). It would be a pity to waste it.