New International Ranking

 A new ranking has appeared, the CWUR World Universities Rankings published by the Center for World University Ranking in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The top ten are:

1.  Harvard
2.  MIT
3.  Stanford
4.  Cambridge
5.  Caltech
6.  Princeton
7.  Oxford
8.  Yale
9.  Columbia
10. UC Berkeley

The criteria are:

• Quality of Faculty. This is based on full time faculty members who have won a variety of awards, including the Nobel Prize and the Fields Medal, as in the Shanghai rankings, and     others such as the Abel, Templeton and World Food Prizes. Weighting of 4.
• Quality of research: Publications in top journals. For science and the social sciences top journals are those included in the ISI journal citation reports weighted according to the Article Impact Score (AIS). For the humanities, the list of journals is compiled from the INT1 set of prestigious international journals published by the European reference Index for the Humanities. Weighting of 1.
• Quality of Research: Highly influential research. This is based on the number of publications in journals multiplied by the journals' AIS. Weighting of 1.
• Quality of Research: Citations. This includes citations from journals in science, the social sciences and the arts and humanities. Weighting of 1.
• Quality of Research: Patents. Weighting of 1.
• Alumni who have won awards -- listed under Quality of Faculty -- relative to the institution's size, which is determined by current enrollment.Weighting of 4.
• Number of alumni who are heads of companies in the Forbes Global 2000 list. Weighting of 4.

Basically, this is an expanded and elaborated version of the Shanghai ARWU. Like the Shanghai rankings, the CWUR rankings claim to assess quality of teaching by the accomplishments of alumni although they use many more international prizes. Similarly, faculty quality is assessed by the number of staff who have won these prizes. The quality of research is measured by four factors rather than three and these may be more resistant to manipulation than the highly cited researchers indicator in the Shanghai rankings. In addition, the new rankings include publications and citations in the arts and humanities.
 
The top 100 includes several medical schools and graduate only and specialised institutions like Rockefeller University and UC San Francisco. There are five Japanese universities and one Korean  but none from Hong Kong or mainland China. A indication of the ranking's objectivity is that Israeli schools do well.


It is disappointing that the new rankings include only 100 institutions. Also, they do not give scores but only rank order for the various indicators, something that will make it difficult to track performance if further editions appear.

If the CWUR rankings had appeared in 2003 at the same time as the Shanghai rankings they would have been judged to be more comprehensive and valid.  But, after nine years Shanghai is the market leader for research-based rankings and catching up will be a difficult task.