The Other THE African University Rankings

THE have just presented Africa and the world with a list of 30 African universities ranked according to "research impact", that is the number of citations per paper normalised by field (300 of them?) and year. Citations are not just counted but compared with the world average for specific years and fields.

The result is that a university that manages to join a large international project, typically in medicine, genetics or particle physics with a disproportionate number of citations especially in the first couple of years of publication, can get an extremely high score. If the university had few publications to begin with the score for this indicator would be even higher.

For these rankings THE have introduced fractionalised counting. so that a university that is one of 100 contributors to a project with 2000 citations would get the equivalent of 20 citations. Under the procedure THE and the their former data collectors Thomson Reuters had been using for the world university rankings it would have been credited with 2000 citations as would all the other contributors.

THE are to be congratulated for finally using fractionalised counting which has reduced the likelihood of the indicator producing very odd results. Even so, the snapshot ranking is inappropriate for African universities, as it still privileges those that happen to contribute to to a few international projects.

The results might seem acceptable to THE and its international audiencebut I suspect that Egyptian academics will be amused by a ranking that includes six universities but not Cairo University . I wonder how many Nigerians will accept a ranking that includes Port Harcourt but not Ibadan or Ahmadu Bello.

Along with standardised scores for citations THE has also included the number of publications in the Scopus database between 2009 and 2013. This, a measurement of research output of a fairly high quality, is probably more relevant to Africa than the citations indicator. Unfortunately, it shows the very limited amount of research done between the Sahara and the Kalahari and so would be inexpedient to present as a snapshot of what a future ranking might look like.

The methods, approaches and assumptions of THE's world rankings with their emphasis on inputs, especially income, research quality, inappropriately called research impact or research influence, reputation, and doctoral education are of limited value to all but a few African universities and stakeholders. Whether anything of value comes from the conversation in Johannesburg remains to be seen but it is unlikely that a modified version of the world rankings will be of much value to anyone.

Anyway, below are the 30 African universities reordered according to number of publications.

Rank	University	Country	number of  publications 2009-2013
1	University of Cape Town	South Africa	5540.21
2	University of Pretoria	South Africa	4544.33
3	University of the Witwatersrand	South Africa	4387.17
4	Stellenbosch University	South Africa	4357.33
5	University of Kwazulu-Natal	South Africa	4235.09
6	Alexandria University	Egypt	2550.15
7	Universite de Sfax	Tunisia	2355.30
8	University of Johannesburg	South Africa	2192.74
9	North West University	South Africa	1707.94
10	Assiut University	Egypt	1588.64
11	University of the Free State	South Africa	1512.56
12	Université Mohammed V – Agdal	Morocco	1503.69
13	Rhodes University	South Africa	1296.96
14	University of the Western Cape	South Africa	1154.77
15	Makerere University	Uganda	1112.69
16	Suez Canal University	Egypt	998.98
17	University of South Africa	South Africa	981.67
18	Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University	South Africa	885.77
19	Universite Hassan II Casablanca	Morocco	960.25
20	Universite Cadi Ayyad	Morocco	910.82
21	Addis Ababa University	Ethiopia	893.90
22	Univerite de Tunis	Tunisia	879.63
23	Universite de Yaounde I	Cameroons	876.33
24	Ecole Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Sfax	Tunisia	822.31
25	University of Ghana	Ghana	804.53
26	American University in Cairo	Egypt	700.89
27	Minia University	Egypt	694.79
28	University of Nairobi	Kenya	671.72
29	South Valley University	Egypt	636.85
30	University of Port Harcourt	Nigeria	573.55