An Unwelcome Message

Phil Baty, who is in charge of world university rankings at Times Higher Education, writes about an email that he has received.

I was disturbed by an email that dropped into my in-box late last
month.

No, it was not another offer of cheap Viagra, or an announcement that I
had won an overseas lottery. It was more unsettling than that.

"Dear academic," it began. The greeting alone was a surprise, given
that I am a journalist with little more than a bachelor's degree by way of
academic credentials.

But my unease grew with each line of the message. The email was from a
major education information company inviting me to take part in an online survey
that would be used to create a university ranking.

It said that my role as a leading educationalist combined with my
subject focus made my opinion very important. It even offered to enter me into a
prize draw if I passed on my great wisdom and spent 10 minutes filling in the
form.

It would be amusing if the implications were not so serious. As the
email claimed, the audience for the company's annual exercise is in the
millions, and it is clear that university league tables in various forms have
become a very big business with wide influence.

Any organisation, such as Times Higher Education, that seeks to create
rankings must accept its responsibility to conduct thorough research and to
employ sound data.

There is a responsibility on companies doing such surveys that
academics are selected carefully by discipline, and by country and continent if
appropriate. If compilers want universities and students to see their league
table as robust the onus is on them to take a rigorous approach. When rankings can make or break a university's reputation, or influence multimillion-pound strategic decisions, anything less will simply not do.

I am sure that anyone reading this blog has received the message by now and knows that the mysterious sender is not Voldemort but QS, who are now producing their own university rankings independently of THE.

The sending of the message and form to Phil Baty actually represents an improvement for the QS survey. Even without a doctorate, he is probably better qualified to evaluate universities than most subscribers to the World Scientific mailing list, of whom nearly 200,000 receive the form every year. Subscription requires nothing more than the ability to click a mouse a few times.

I wonder though whether those who completed the THE survey form sent out by Thomson Reuters to authors who have published in ISI indexed journals are significantly better qualified. I have heard that there are many parts of the world where the granting of co-authorship of research papers is simply a perquisite of seniority within a department and nomination as corresponding author, the one who gets to go to conferences and do a bit of shopping, is decided partly or largely by political pressures.

It may be that the time has come for a greater variety of reputational surveys to be conducted. There is certainly room for a QS - style survey, essentially open to anyone who, for whatever reason, is interested. After all, that is a constituency that deserves some consideration . But equally, perhaps more so, we need as survey of research excellence that targets demonstrably competent researchers. The ability to be nominated as corresponding author -- I assume that is the one whose email addresses is entered in the ISI archives -- of a paper once in an academic career mught not be sufficient evidence of competence to evaluate university research and teaching. There is a case for a survey based on a more rigorous working definition of research competence, such as inclusion in the ISI list of highly cited researchers. Another possiblty might be to survey editors of academic journals. Response rates could be boosted by publishing the journals who took part. There is also an obvious niche for a student based survey of teaching.

Anyway, Phil, you might as well do the survey. There are many people less knowledgable than you filling out the form and, for that matter, the one for THE . You might even be the one who wins the BlackBerry.