The Shanghai Rankings 4

The publications indicator in the Shanghai ARWU simply measures all science and social science publications in the ISI Science and Social Science Indexes over the previous year. The Arts and Humanities Index is excluded.

It is safe to assume that developing universities will start producing large numbers of publications before work that is of sufficient quality to justify a Nobel or Fields award or publication in Science or Nature. This indicator should then tell us something about that universities that are likely to forge ahead in the coming decade.

The top five for this indicator are:

1.  Harvard
2.  Toronto
3.  Michigan at Ann Arbor
4.  Tokyo
5.  Sao Paulo

Among the rising stars in the top fifty for this indicator are Seoul National University (15th), Peking (27th), National Taiwan University (36th) and Tsinghua (44th).

The Productivity per Capita indicator is one that is rather incoherent as it combines the scores for the other indicators, which may represent achievements from years or decades ago or from last year, and divides them by the current number of senior faculty, including those in the humanities whose papers are not counted. This is one indicator where spending cuts could actually have a positive effect.

For once, Harvard is second and first place is taken by Caltech. The top fifty contains an assortment of specialised institutions such as Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa, Ecole Normale Superieure Paris, Stockholm School of Economics and the Technical University of Munich.