Leiden Ranking: Many Ways to Rate Research
My article on the Leiden Rankings in University World News can be found here.
It looks as though a two-tier international university ranking system is emerging.
At the top we have the 'big three', Shanghai's Academic Ranking of World Universities, the QS World University Rankings and, since 2010, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
These receive massive attention from the media, are avidly followed by academics, students and other stakeholders and are often quoted in promotional literature. Graduation from a university included in these has even been proposed as a requirement for immigration.
Then we have the rankings by SCImago and Webometrics, both from Spain, the Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities produced by the Higher education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan, and the Leiden Ranking, published by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University.
These rankings get less publicity but are technically very competent and in some ways more reliable than the better-known rankings.
4 comments:
ARWU (with GRUP) / THES-WUR and QS-WUR all interact directly with the universities and collect profiles so make one logical group but at Wollongong we view Webometrics as different to the others you list - having a specific technical web presence agenda rather than research or overall performance whereas HEACT, SCImago and Leiden can also be readily grouped (though of course each is very different in how mid table unis are rated).
"The measurement of research impact has reached a high level of sophistication, but the problem now is how to choose among the various indicators and how to combine them."
This is the "problem" facing all college ranking systems, is it not?
I'm actually not so sure it is a problem so much as a fundamental feature of all scientific endeavor: the inextricably value-laden determination of what to measure and how much importance to give it within the overall story/theory.
Perhaps the problem, if there is one, is when people/institutions/systems claim a degree of objectivity that denies or masks this element of human subjectivity, rather than being open and transparent about it.
These ratings are incredibly useful for that they use several signs or symptoms and have included entertaining functions that allow us to see how many different techniques there are of computing analysis quality and how very different outcomes can be acquired by using different signs or symptoms.
Survey questionnaire analysis
The statement of Aden Steiken is slighty wrong. Those commercial rankings are not collecting information from the universities, they are mainly collecting MONEY
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