Reputation, reputation, reputation!

As the world (or some of it) waits for the ranking survey forms to appear in its mail boxes, both THE and QS are promoting their surveys.

According to Phil Baty of THE:

"But in our consultation with the sector, there was strong support for the continued use of reputation information in the world rankings. Some 79 per cent of respondents to a survey by our rankings data provider Thomson Reuters rated reputation as a “must have” or “nice to have” measure. We operate in a global market where reputation clearly matters."

He then indicates several ways in which the THE survey is an improvement over the THE-QS, now QS, survey.

"We received a record 13,388 usable responses in just three months, making the survey the biggest of its kind in the world.


We promised a transparent approach. The methodology and survey instrument were published in full and this week, the thousands of academics who took part in the survey were sent a detailed report on the respondent profile. It makes reassuring reading:


• Responses were received from 131 countries"

It would, however, be interesting if the number of respondents from all countries were indicated. There are some people who wonder whether THE's sampling technique means that Singapore got the lion's share of responses in Southeast Asia.

Also, will THE publish the scores for the reputation surveys? At the moment they are bundled in with the other teaching and research indicators. What is the correlation between the score for research reputation and the citations indicator? Is there any sign that Alexandria, Bilkant or Hong Kong Baptist University have reputations that match their scores for research impact?

Meanwhile QS also has an item on its survey. They find that there is a similar demand for data on reputations.

"An impressive 79% of respondents, voted reputation for research as one of their top three criteria, with 60% choosing international profile of faculty, essentially another indicator of international reputation for research. This is in stark contrast to the 26% and 30% that prioiritised citations as a key measure.



Furthermore, when breaking these results out by broad faculty area, we can see consistent support across disciplines for the reputation measure but a marked dip in support for citations as a measure amongst respondents in the Arts & Humanities area – which tends to be the area least recognized by traditional measures of research output."