Google Scholar Ranking of African Universities

As competition in the ranking world intensifies, Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds are  diligently promoting their various regional ranking, data processing and event management projects. The latest is THE's African summit at the University of Johannesburg.

Three weeks ago THE issued what they described as an "experimental and preliminary" ranking which consisted of 15 universities ordered according to the number of citations per paper normalised for field and year. An interesting innovation was that citations were fractionalised so that participants in large collaborative projects would be credited in proportion to their fraction of the total contributors .

This is just one indicator and it is not really a measure of research influence, but rather of research quality and it is still skewed by participation in multi-contributor papers in medicine and particle physics. It is unlikely that the University of Port Harcourt or Universite Cadi Ayyad would  be in the top ten of any other indicator.

THE have indicated that they will add another 15 names to the list at the Johannesburg summit.

The table below was compiled for the purpose of checking on the claims of THE or other rankers that might attempt to evaluate African universities. It simply counts the number of results (2012-2014: exclude citations and patents) from a query to Google Scholar. Data was compiled on the 25th and 26th of July. The criteria for inclusion were being in the top 50 of the Webometrics rankings or the 15 universities in the THE list. The top university in any country not included was added from either the Webometrics or ic4u rankings.

This database includes papers, reports, theses and dissertations, conference proceedings and so on. It is certainly not a measure of research quality but rather of the volume of any activities connected with research.  In the case of the two Kenyan universities it probably reflects the size and inclusiveness of the university repositories.

One thing about the Google scholar list is that it confirms suspicions that the quality of Egyptian universities has been underestimated by the big name rankers. For further evidence one might look at data from social media such as LinkedIn or just contrast the aspirations of Egyptian students in the revolutions of 2011 and 2013 compared with those of students at the University of Cape Town and Durban University of Technology.

Rank	University	Country	Google Scholar  Results
1	University of Cape Town	South Africa	17,000
2	Cairo University	Egypt	16,800
3	University of Pretoria	South Africa	16,500
4	University of Nairobi	Kenya	16,400
5	University of the Witwatersrand	South Africa	15,800
6	University of Kwazulu-Natal	South Africa	15,500
7	Stellenbosch University	South Africa	14,900
8	University of Ibadan	Nigeria	14,800
9	University of South Africa	South Africa	13,500
10	Kenyatta University	Kenya	12,000
11	University of Johannesburg	South Africa	11,200
12	Makerere University	Uganda	10,400
13	North West University	South Africa	10,100
14	University of Ghana	Ghana	8,330
15	Alexandria University	Egypt	7,610
16	University of Lagos	Nigeria	7,220
17	Rhodes University	South Africa	7,210
18	University of the Western Cape	South Africa	6,870
19	Obafemi Awolowo University	Nigeria	6,800
20	Mansoura University	Egypt	6,480
21	University of the Free State	South Africa	6,400
22	Addis Ababa University	Ethiopia	6,210
23	Zagazig University	Egypt	6,160
24	American University in Cairo	Egypt	5,770
25	University of Ilorin	Nigeria	5,620
26	Assiut University	Egypt	5,580
27	Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology	Ghana	5,080
28=	University of Zimbabwe	Zimbabwe	4,830
28=	University of Port Harcourt	Nigeria	4,830
30	University of Botswana	Botswana	4,260
31	University of Zambia	Zambia	4,240
32	University of Dar Es Salaam	Tanzania	4,120
33	University of Khartoum	Sudan	4,110
34	Suez Canal University	Egypt	3,670
35	Tanta University	Egypt	3,600
36	Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology	Kenya	3,520
37	Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University	South Africa	3,490
38	Covenant University Ota	Nigeria	2,950
39	Helwan University	Egypt	2,940
40	Benha University	Egypt	2,570
41	Minia University	Egypt	2,390
42	University of Malawi	Malawi	2,340
43	Université Abou Bekr Belkaid	Algeria	2,290
44	Universityof Tunis	Tunisia	2,270
45=	Université Kasdi Merbah Ouargla	Algeria	2,240
45=	Cape Peninsula University of Technology	South Africa	2,240
47	Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar	Senegal	1,950
48	University of Namibia	Namibia	1,760
49	Universite de la Reunion	Reunion	1,690
50	Durban University of Technology	South Africa	1,560
51	University of Mauritius	Mauritius	1,490
52	Université d'Abomey-Calavi	Benin	1,460
53	South Valley University	Egypt	1,440
54	Universidade Eduardo Mondlane	Mozambique	1,420
55	Beni-Suef University	Egypt	1,400
56	Université Cadi Ayyad Marrakech	Morroco	1,370
57	Université de Ouagadougou	Burkina Faso	1,300
58	University of Rwanda	Rwanda	1,270
59	Université des Sciences et de la Technologie Houari Boumediene	Algeria	976
60	Université de Lomé	Togo	784
61	Université de Bamako	Mali	660
62	Kafrelsheikh University	Egypt	618
63	University of Swaziland	Swaziland	615
64	Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny	Ivory Coast	590
65	Université de Kinshasa	Domocratic Republic of the Congo	558
66	National University of Lesotho	Lesotho	555
67	Université Constantine 1	Algeria	468
68	Bejaia University	Algeria	413
69	Universidade Jean Piaget de Cabo Verde	Cape Verde	407
70	Université Mohammed V Souissi	Tunisia	361
71	National Engineering School of Sfax	Tunisia	271
72	Université Marien Ngouabi	Republc of Congo	256
73	University of Liberia	Liberia	255
74	Université Djillali Liabes	Algeria	243
75	Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey	Niger	206
76	Misurata University	Libya	155
77	Université Omar Bongo	Gabon	138
78	University of The Gambia	Gambia	130
79	Universidade Católica de Angola	Angola	115
80=	Université de Dschang	Cameroons	113
80=	Université de Bangui	Central African Empire	113
82	Université de Nouakchott	Mauretania	108
83	Eritrea Institute of Technology	Eritrea	76
84	Université de Djibouti	Djibouti	66
85	Université de Toliara	Madagascar	59
86	Université Hassan II Ain Chock	Morocco	55
87	University of Seychelles	Seychelles	52
88	Mogadishu University	Somalia	51
89	Universidad Nacional de Guinea Ecuatorial	Equatorial Guinea	40
90	Universite Gamal Abdel Nasser de Conakry	Guinea	21
91	University of Makeni	Sierra Leone	18
92	John Garang Memorial University	South Sudan	12
93	Hope Africa University	Burundi	3
94	Universite de Moundou	Chad	2

Would anyone notice if a small, old but awfully clever dog filled in a university ranking survey, and would it make a difference?

The Australian newspaper The Age has a piece by Erica Cervini on how she allowed her dog to complete the QS academic reputation survey on the quality of veterinary schools.

She doesn't elaborate on how the dog chose the schools. Was it by barking or tail wagging when shown pictures of the buildings?

Seriously though, she does have a point. Can QS stop people signing up just to support their employer or outvote their rivals?

To be fair, QS are aware that their surveys might be manipulated and have taken steps over the years to prevent this by such means as forbidding respondents from voting for their declared employer or repeat voting from the same computer. Even so, it seems that some universities, especially in Latin America, are getting scores in the reputation surveys that appear too high,especially when compared with their overall scores. In the employer survey the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile is 56th (overall 167) and the University of Buenos Aires 49th (overall 198). In the academic survey the University of Sao Paulo is 54th (overall 132 and the National Autonomous University of Mexico 55th (overall 175).

QS are apparently considering reforming their citations per faculty indicator and allowing unchanged responses to the surveys to be recycled for five instead of three years. This is welcome but a more rigorous overhaul of the reputation indicators is sorely needed.

Perfect Storm Heading for Tokyo Metropolitan University

Seen on the Times Higher Education website today:

Tokyo Metropolitan University

World's Best University

Scored a Perfect 100.00 for Two Years in Citations Sector

From TMU to the World

Tokyo Metropolitan University got its perfect score largely because it was one of hundreds of institutions contributing to a few publications from the Large Hadron Collider project. In their recent experimental African rankings THE started using fractionalized counting of citations. If THE use this method in the coming world rankings then TMU will surely suffer a dramatic fall in the citations indicator.

I would not like to be the president of TMU on September 30th.

Recommended Reading

Anybody interested in educational policy, especially the never ending campaign to close gaps of one sort or another or the oddities of university rankings should take a look at chapter four of Jordan Ellenberg's How not to be wrong: The  power of mathematical thinking which is about the obvious -- or ought to be obvious observation -- that smaller populations are more variable.

He notes that South Dakota is top of the league for brain cancer while North Dakota is near the bottom. What makes the difference? It is just that the bigger the population the more likely it is that outliers will be diluted by a great mass of mediocrity. So, extreme scores tend to crop up in small places or small samples.

Similarly when he tossed coins ten at a time he came up head counts ranging from 3 to 9 out of ten.

When he tossed them 100 at a time he got counts ranging from 45 to 60.

When he (actually his computer program) tossed them 1,000 times, the counts ranged from 462 to 537.

It is worth remembering this when a study with a double digit sample is published showing the latest way to close one of achievement gaps or a very small school in a rural state somewhere starts boosting the test scores of underperforming students or a few test takers reveal that the national IQ is imploding. Or the studies fail to be replicated, if indeed anyone tries.

Or university rankings that show very small or very unproductive institutions having an enormous research impact measured by citations.

In the QS BRICS rankings nearly everybody gets a prize

There is a growing trend towards specialised and regional university rankings. The magic of this is that they can provide something for almost everybody. QS recently published its latest BRICS rankings which combined data from five very different university systems. The result was a triumphant (almost) success for everybody (almost).

Here are some highlights that QS could use in selling the BRICS rankings or an expanded version.

Russian universities are ahead of everybody else for teaching quality.

The top 21 universities in the BRICS for Faculty Student Ratio (perhaps not a perfect proxy for teaching excellence) are Russian, headed by Bauman Moscow State Technical University. Imagine what Russian universities could do if QS recognised the importance of teaching and increased the weighting for this indicator.

India performs excellently for Faculty with a Ph D.

Out of the top 15 for this category, ten are Indian and all of these get the maximum score of 100. Of the other five, four are Brazilian and one Chinese. If only QS realised the importance of a highly qualified faculty, India would do much better in the overall rankings.

South Africa takes five out of the first six places for international faculty.

China has four out of five top places for academic reputation and employer reputation.

Meanwhile a Brazilian university is first for international faculty and another is third for academic reputation.

It seems that with rankings like these a lot depends on the weighting assigned to the various indicators.

Yes, going to the library might be good for you

A study by Felly Chiteng Kot and Jennifer L. Jones has found that

"using a given library resource was associated with a small, but also meaningful, gain in first-term grade point average, net of other factors."

But, correlation does not necessarily mean causation. Could it be that bright people like to go to libraries?

Still, most students are likely to behave better in the library than other places, so let's not quibble too much.

Implications of the THE African Pilot Ranking

The most interesting thing about THE's experimental African ranking is the use of fractionalised counting of citations. This means that the total number of citations is divided by the number of institutions contributing to a publication. Previously, the method used in THE rankings was to assign the total citations of a paper to all of the institutions that contributed just as though each one had been the only contributor. This has produced some very questionable results with universities that were excellent but very specialised or just generally unproductive  scoring remarkably high scores for citations. Panjab university, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa, Federico Santa Maria Technical University and Moscow State Engineering Physics Institute have all had moments of glory in the THE rankings because of  citation scores that were dramatically higher than their scores for research or any other indicator or group of indicators.

The new method, if applied generally, is likely to see a significant reduction in the scores given to such universities. We can estimate what might happen by looking at the four universities that are included in both the African pilot ranking and last year's world rankings,  Cape Town, Witwatersrand, Stellenbosch and Universite Marrakesh Cadi Ayyad, Morocco.

In the world rankings these universities received scores of 86.6, 67.3, 45.6 and 83 respectively. The score of 83 for Universite Cadi Ayyad resulted very largely from its contributions to several publications from the Large Hadron Collider project, one of which has been cited over 2,000 times, a low overall output of papers and the "regional modification" that gave a big boost to low scoring countries. The scores for the three South African universities reflected a larger total output and citations over a broad range of disciplines.

In the African pilot ranking the scores for citations were Cape Town 90.90, Witwatersrand 99.76, Stellenbosch 95.48 and Cadi Ayyad 78.61. The high scores for the South African institutions reflect a much lower mean score than in the world rankings. 

The fall in Cadi Ayyad's citation score from 3.6 points below Cape Town to 21.3 below and its falling behind Stellenbosch and Witwatersrand presumably reflect the impact of fractionalised counting.

This suggests that if fractionalised counting is used in the coming World University Rankings many small or specialised institutions will suffer and there will be a lot of reshuffling. 

The Top University in Africa is ...

... the University of Cape Town. What a surprise!

Times Higher Education (THE) has produced another "snapshot" ranking. This one is a list of 15 African universities ranked according to "research influence", that is the number of citations per paper normalised by field and year. It seems that a larger list will be published at a THE summit at the university of Johannesburg scheduled for the end of this month. Then, apparently, there will be discussions about full rankings with a broad range of indicators.

This is a smart move. Apart from diluting the impact of the QS BRICS rankings, this table puts the summit host in the top ten and gets attention from around the continent with three places in the north, two in the west and two in the east in the top fifteen.

Here is the top 15:

1.   University of Cape Town, South Africa
2.   University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
3.   Makerere University, Uganda
4.   Stellenbosch University, South Africa
5.   University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa
6.   University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria
7.   University of the Western Cape, South Africa
8.   University of Nairobi, Kenya
9.    University of Johannesburg, South Africa
10.  Universite Cadi Ayyad, Morrocco
11.  University of Pretoria, South Africa
12.  University of Ghana
13.  University of South Africa
14.  Suez Canal University, Egypt
15.  Universite Hassan II, Morrocco.

This is, of course, just one indicator but even so there will be a few academic eyebrows rising around the continent. Makerere has a good national and regional reputation but does it have more research influence than all but two South African universities?

How come Suez Canal University is there but not Cairo University or the American University in Cairo? And I am sure that in Nigeria there will be a lot of smirking around Ahmadu Bello and Ibadan Universities about Port Harcourt in sixth place.

One very good thing about this "experimental and preliminary ranking" is that THE and data provider Scopus are now using fractionalised counting of citations, so that if 100 universities contribute to a publication they each get credit for one hundredth of the citations.

That has not stopped Makerere and Port Harcourt from getting a boost, perhaps too much of a boost, for taking part in a huge multinational medical study but it has reduced the distortions that this indicator can cause.

So, for once, well done THE!... Now, what about taking a look at secondary affiliations?

Is this really happening?

If this continues France will be the least intelligent country in the world in a century.

Drawing straight lines on graphs and getting excited about tiny samples can be dangerous. Even so, this is a little frightening.

James Thompson's blog notes a study by Edward Dutton and Richard Lynn that suggests that the French national average IQ declined by nearly 4 points in a decade. The sample size was only 79 so we should not start panicking too much until there are a few more studies. It will be interesting to see if this one is replicated.

Now the British Academy Sees a Problem

Yesterday I referred to the poor numeracy skills of British (England and Northern Ireland) tertiary graduates reported by the OECD.

Now the British Academy has had its say. It reports that the performance of British school pupils is mediocre and that many undergraduate students are weak in statistics.

But it looks like middling (compared to the OECD average) secondary school students become almost rock bottom (in the OECD) tertiary graduates. Could it be that British universities are actually subtracting relative value from their students?

The Academy notes:

Our school pupils tend to be ranked only in the middle of developed nations in mathematics. Our undergraduates embark on degree courses with varying, and often weak, fluency in statistics. And, in the workplace, demand for more advanced quantitative skills has risen sharply in the past two decades.

Perhaps this has something to do with relatively high graduation rates at British universities so that mediocre students with weak numeracy skills will be recorded as tertiary graduates while their counterparts in most of the OECD will drop out and remain classified as secondary graduate. Even if that were the case the mediocrity of secondary students and tertiary graduates would still need to be addressed.

The Academy proposes a strategy that includes improving the quality of quantitative skills teaching, reviewing school curricula and addressing the early dropping of maths by secondary school students.

I suspect that that will be insufficient.

Today India, Tomorrow Japan, Then ....

The ranking businesses are extending their global tentacles. Times Higher Education has produced a "snapshot" MENA ranking that produced interesting results -- Texas A&M University Qatar top for research impact -- and will be announcing their world rankings from Melbourne.

Meanwhile, QS will be in India next week to reveal their latest BRICS rankings and has been getting attention in new places for its subject rankings that get to places other rankings won't go.

With QS getting more international, it is no surprise to hear that Mitsui & Co, Ltd, has purchased shares in QS:

'Nunzio Quacquarelli, CEO of QS said the investment from Mutsui “can especially support our development in Asia” adding, “we were seeking and have found a likeminded company which shares our long term vision” '.

 This is not the first sign of Mitsui's interest in tertiary education:

'Last year the company also invested $5m in Synergis Education, an education company specialising in online and on the ground adult learner programmes.
“We aim to use our experience in the online education field to create new services,” said Takeshi Akutsu, GM of Mitsui Service Business Division in a statement.
“At the same time, through this business we will help to nurture the global human resources needed by the global economy.” '

I wonder if QS will try and start ranking online courses.next.