Well Done, QS
QS have just indicated that they have excluded self-citations from their citations per faculty indicator in this year's World University Rankings. This is a very positive move that will remove some of the distortions that have crept into this indicator over the last few years. It would have been even better if they had excluded citations within journals and within institutions. Maybe next year.
It will be interesting to see if Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuters do the same with their rankings in October.It would not be very difficult and it might help to exclude Alexandria University and a few others from an undeserved place in the world's top universities for research impact.
(By the way Karolinska Institute is not in the US)
Although it may not make very much difference at the very top of this indicator, it seems that some places have suffered severely and others have benefited from the change. According to the QS intelligence unit:
- Of all of the institutions we looked at the institution with the largest absolute number of self-citations, by some margin, is Harvard with over 93,000 representing 12.9% of their overall citations count
- The top five institutions producing over 3,000 papers, in terms of proportion of self-citations are all in Eastern Europe – St Petersburg State University, Czech Technical University, Warsaw University of Technology, Babes-Bolyai University and Lomonosov Moscow State University
- The top five in terms of the difference in citations per paper when self-citations are excluded are Caltech, Rockefeller, UC Santa Cruz, ENS Lyon and the University of Hawaii
- And the top 10 in terms of the difference in citations per faculty when self-citations are included are:
| # | Institution | Country |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | California Institute of Technology (Caltech) | United States |
| 2 | Rockefeller University | United States |
| 3 | Stanford University | United States |
| 4 | Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) | South Korea |
| 5 | Karolinska Institute | United States |
| 6 | Princeton University | United States |
| 7 | Leiden University | Netherlands |
| 8 | Harvard University | United States |
| 9 | University of California, San Diego (UCSD) | United States |
| 10 | University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) | United States |
It is good and bad. Good in the sense that it mitigates the alexandria type effect but bad because some authors work in very specialiazed areas.
ReplyDeleteHeres another problem: there is nonlinearity here. You need to take size into consideration. You cannot compare a small elite school like Caltech to a larger school like Berkeley for research excellence. If you reduced the size of Berkeley by only keeping the top profs then their citations per faculty would jump dramatically i.e., there is nonlinearity.
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