What good is reputation?

There is an excellent analysis by Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates of the reputation indicators in the THE and QS world rankings.

Main points include:

• THE and QS are both insufficiently transparent about their reputation surveys and it is very difficult to judge their reliability. 

• The numbers responding to the THE survey are very small outside the top 50 and this could cause substantial changes in total scores because of a small increase or decease in the number of votes.

• The lack of transparency is influenced by commercial motives.

THE has been dropping twitter hints about interesting changes in the forthcoming rankings. Are these due to swings in the votes on the surveys?

 Or could it be the Large Hadron Collider Citation Amplifier?