It was a bit of a surprise when US News & World Report (USNWR) announced that they were going global but perhaps it shouldn't have been. The USNWR has been ranking American colleges since the early 80s, making even the Shanghai Centre for World Class Universities or QS look like novices. Also, with the advance of globalisation of higher education and research there is now a market for comparisons of US universities and their international competitors.
The Best Global Universities rankings are research based, except for two indicators, each with a 5% weighting, that count Ph D degrees. They are also heavily citation oriented, with a huge 42.5% weighting going to citations. However, the US News staff have used their common sense and included four measures of citations, normalized citation impact, total citations, number of highly cited papers and percentage of highly cited papers.
The result of this is that many of the high fliers in this year's THE rankings are absent. Bogazici University in Turkey, 14th best in Asia according to THE, is absent, So is Federico Santa Maria Technical University in Chile, according to THE second best in Latin America and Panjab University, supposedly the second best in India.
The reason for this contrast is simply that THE and Thomson Reuters rewarded these institutions for a few physics papers with hundreds of participating institutions by using a very inappropriate methodology and giving it a 30% weighting. USNWR have trimmed this indicator to 10% and so the high fliers have been grounded.
Unfortunately they are using the subjective "reputation" data as one of the inputs.
ReplyDeleteThe output of a ranking is reputation, which should not be used as next year's input.