Light Posting Ahead

For the next few weeks posting will be light as I am attending to family matters.

Eight years of ranking: What have we learned?

My post at the University World News World Blog can be viewed here.

University Ranking by Academic Performance

Perhaps too much attention is given to the big three international rankings -- ARWU (the Shanghai Rankings), the QS World University Rankings and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

So, here is what I hope will be the first of  a number of posts about the other rankings that have appeared recently.

The University Ranking of Academic Performance is produced by the Informatics Institute of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara.

The indicators are as follows:

Number of articles -- measures current scientific productivity
Google scholar results -- measures long term overall productivity
Citations -- measures research impact
Cumulative Journal Impact -- measures scientific impact
H- index --- measures research quality
International collaboration -- measures international acceptance


These are the top ten:

1.  Harvard
2.  Toronto
3.  Johns Hopkins
4.  Stanford

5.  UC Berkeley
6.  Tokyo
7.  Michigan, Ann Arbor
8.  Washington, Seattle
9.  UCLA
10. Oxford

Think Tank Ranking

There seems to be little that cannot be ranked these days. In the UK there are primary school league tables although nowhere in the world is there a kindergarten ranking. Yet.

The University of Pennsylvania has produced a report on think tanks. These are apparently flourishing everywhere: even Andorra has one.

Here are the top five world wide:

1.  Brookings Institution, USA

2.  Chatham House Royal Institute of International Affairs, UK

3.  Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, USA

4.  Council on Foreign Relations, USA

5.  Center for Strategic and International Studies, USA