More on Citations

A column in the THE by Phil Baty indicates that there might be some change in the research impact indicator in the forthcoming THE World University Rankings. It is good that THE is considering changes but I have a depressing feeling that  Thomson Reuters, who collect the citations data, are going to have more weight in this matter than anyone or anything else.

Baty refers to a paper by Simon Pratt who manages the data for TR and THE.

The issue was brought up again this month in a paper to the RU11 group of 11 leading research universities in Japan. It was written by Simon Pratt, project manager for institutional research at Thomson Reuters, which supplies the data for THE’s World University Rankings.


Explaining why THE’s rankings normalise for citations data by discipline, Pratt highlights the extent of the differences. In molecular biology and genetics, there were more than 1.6 million citations for the 145,939 papers published between 2005 and 2009, he writes; in mathematics, there were just 211,268 citations for a similar number of papers (140,219) published in the same period.


Obviously, an institution with world-class work in mathematics would be severely penalised by any system that did not reflect such differences in citations volume.

This is correct but perhaps we should also consider whether the number of citations to papers in genetics is telling us something about the value that societies place on genetics rather than on mathematics and perhaps that is something that should not be ignored.


Also, in the real world are there many universities that are excellent in a single field, defined as narrowly as theoretical physics or applied mathematics, while being mediocre or worse in everything else? Anyone who thinks that Alexandria is the fourth best university in the world for research impact because of its uncontested excellence in mathematics should take a look here.

There are also problems with normalising by region. Precisely what the regions are for the purposes of this indicator is not stated. If Africa is a region, does this mean that Alexandria got another boost, one denied to other Middle Eastern universities? Is Istanbul in Europe and Bilkent in Asia? Does Singapore get an extra weighting because of the poor performance of its Southeastern neighbours?

There are two other aspects of the normalisation that are not foregrounded in the article. First, TR apparently use normalisation by year. In some disciplines it is rare for a paper to be cited within a year of publication..In others it is commonplace. An article that is classified  as being in a low citation field would get a massive boost if in addition it had a few citations within months of publication.

Remember also that the scores represent averages. A small number of total publications means an immense advantage for a university that has a few highly cited article in low cited fields and is located in a normally unproductive region. Alexandria's remarkable success was due to the convergence of four favourable factors: credit for publishing in a low citation sub-discipline, the frequent citation of recently published papers, being located in a continent whose scholars are not generally noticed and finally the selfless cooperation of hundreds of faculty who graciously refrained from sending papers to ISI indexed journals.

Alexandria University may not be open for the rest of this year and may not take part in the second THE WUR exercise. One wonders though how many universities around the world could benefit from these four factors and how many are getting ready to submit data to Thomson Reuters.