Hardly a week passes without the publication of yet more international university rankings. This week it was the
Best Arab Region Universities from the
US News, famous for producing America's Best Colleges for over three decades.
These rankings are research based. There are nine indicators, one of which measures the number of publications and has a weighting of 30 per cent. The other eight relate to citations in some way. There are no indicators measuring faculty student ratio, teaching quality, graduate employment, income or reputation.
Inclusion in the rankings required 400 papers in the Scopus database over a five year period,2009 to 2013. It is a serious indictment of Arab universities that only 91 institutions could reach this modest target.
There is an interesting section
in the methodology:
"Papers published by Arab region institutions in the subject area of physics and astronomy were excluded based on input from Elsevier's bibliometric experts, who determined that their citation characteristics would distort the results of the overall rankings. There is, however, a separate subject ranking for physics and astronomy that is based on papers published exclusively in those fields."
This presumably means that US News is aware of the distorting effect of physics publications with a large number of contributing authors, which has helped propel institutions such as Panjab University and Federico Santa Maris Technical University into high spots in the THE world rankings.
The rankings show that research in the Arab world is dominated by a few countries. Just over half of the universities in the rankings come from three countries, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Algeria. However, at the very top the rankings are dominated by Saudi Arabia, which holds the first three places.
The Top Ten are:
1. King Saud University, Saudi Arabia
2. King Abdualaziz University, Saudi Arabia
3. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia
4. Cairo University, Egypt
5. American University of Beirut, Lebanon
6. Mansoura University, Egypt
7. Ain Shams University, Egypt
8 King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia
9. Alexandria University, Egypt
10. United Arab Emirates University
There are also 16 subject rankings. Every one of these is topped by a Saudi university except for the Social Sciences which is headed by the American University of Beirut. In first place in the Physics rankings is King Abdulaziz University which has benefited from those multi-contributor publications which feature at least one of its adjunct faculty with a double affiliation.
Universite Cadi Ayyad Marrakech, Morocco, which was declared by THE to be the best Arab university and best in Africa north of the Kalahari, is in thirtieth place here. I wonder why.