Moving Up

Every so  often political and academic leaders announce plans for getting into the top 50  or 100 or 200 of the global rankings.  The problem is that it is not always clear which rankings they are talking about. Not only do the various league tables have different indicators but doing well in one can actually have negative effects in another. Racking up a large number of publications in ISI-indexed journals would be great for the Shanghai rankings but could be detrimental for the THE World University Rankings until those publications start getting citations that are above average for year, field and country.

A paper by Angela Yung Chi Hou and Chung-Lin Chiang of Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan, and Robert Morse of US News & World Report has been published by Higher Education Research and Development. Here is the abstract

Since the start of the twenty-first century, university rankings have become
internationalized. Global rankings have a variety of uses, levels of popularity and
rationales and they are here to stay. An examination of the results of the current
global ranking reveals that well-reputed world-class universities are amongst the
top ranked ones. A major concern for university administrators in many parts of
the world is how to use the global rankings wisely in their mid-term and longterm
strategic planning for building their institutions into world-class
universities. Four major global rankings have been developed: the Academic
Ranking of World Universities, the World University Rankings, the
Webometrics Ranking of World Universities and the Performance Ranking of
Scientific Papers for World Universities. The main purpose of this paper is to
explore the most influential indicators in these global university rankings that
will affect the rank mobility of an institution. Based on an analysis of correlation
coefficients and K-means clustering, a model of strategic institutional planning
for building a world-class university is proposed.

The paper shows that for universities wishing to stay in the top 30 in various rankings, the most influential indicators are Nobel and Fields Awards in the Shanghai ARWU, Citations per Faculty and Faculty Student Ratio in the QS World University Rankings, Visibility in Webometrics and Citations in the Last Two Years in HEEACT.

For the ambitious intent on moving up the rankings, the indicators to watch out for are Papers in Nature and Science and Productivity per Capita in ARWU, the Academic Survey in QS, Visibility in webometrics and H-index in HEEACT