The QS BRICS Rankings

Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), in partnership with  Interfax, the Russian news agency, have just published their BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa] University Rankings. The top ten are:

1.   Peking University
2.   Tsinghua University
3.   Lomonosov Moscow State University
4.   Fudan University
5.   Nanjing University
6=  University of Science and Technology China
6=  Shanghai Jiao Tong University
8.   Universidade de Sao Paulo
9.   Zhejiang University
10.  Universidade Estadual de Campinas

The highest ranked Indian university is the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in thirteenth place and the top South African institution is the University of Cape Town which is eleventh.

The methodology is rather different from the QS World University Rankings. The weighting for the academic survey has been reduced to 30% and that for the employer survey has gone up to 20%. Faculty student ratio accounts for 20% as it does in the world rankings, staff with PhDs for 10%, papers per faculty for 10%, citations per paper for 5% and international faculty and students for 5%.

There are some noticeable differences between these rankings and the BRICS and emerging countries rankings produced by Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuters.    

Moscow State University is ahead of the University of Cape Town in the QS rankings but well behind in the THE rankings.

In the QS rankings the Indian Institutes of Technology are supreme among Indian institutions. There are seven before the University of Calcutta appears in 52nd place. In the THE rankings the best Indian performer was Panjab University, which is absent from the QS rankings.

I suspect that Panjab University is an example of rankings shopping, where universities target one specific ranking, and that there is a very smart person directing its ranking strategy. Panjab University has invested money in participation in  the Hadron Collider project, exactly where it would profit from TR's field normalised citations indicator, while the number of publications did not rise excessively. Recently the university has proposed to establish integrated master's and doctoral programs, good for two TR  indicators and to increase research collaboration, good for another.

The Moscow State Engineering Physics Institute, which was removed from the THE world rankings this year year because it was a single subject institution, is in 65th place in this table.