Very Interesting Rankings from Times Higher Education

The latest edition of the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings has just been published, along with a big dose of self-flattery and congratulations to the winners of what is beginning to look more like a lottery than an objective exercise in comparative assessment.

The background to the story is that at the end of last year THE broke with their data suppliers Thomson Reuters (TR) and announced the dawn of a new era of transparency and accountability 

There were quite a few things wrong with the THE rankings, especially with the citations indicator which supposedly measured research impact and was given nearly a third of the total weighting. This meant that THE was faced with a serious dilemma. Keeping the old methodology would be a problem but radical reform would raise the question of why THE would want to change what they claimed was a uniquely trusted and sophisticated methodology with carefully calibrated indicators.

It seems that THE have decided to make a limited number of changes but to postpone making a decision about other issues.

They have broadened the academic reputation survey, sending out forms in more languages and getting more responses from outside the USA. Respondents are now drawn from those with publications in the Scopus database, much larger than the Web of Science, as was information about publications and citations. In addition, THE have excluded 649 “freakish” multi – author papers from their calculations and diluted the effect of the regional modification that boosted the scores in the citations indicator of low performing countries.

These changes have led to implausible fluctuations with some institutions rising or falling dozens or hundreds of places. Fortunately for THE, the latest winners are happy to trumpet their success and the losers so far seem to have lapsed into an embarrassed silence.

When they were published on the 30th of September the rankings provided lots of headline fodder about who was up or down.

The Irish Times announced that the rankings showed  Trinity College Dublin had fallen while University College Dublin was rising.

In the Netherlands the University of Twente bragged about its “sensationally higher scores”.

Study International asserted that “Asia Falters” and that Britain and the US were still dominant in higher education.

The London Daily Telegraph claimed  that European universities were matching the US.

The Hindu found something to boast about by noting that India was at last the equal of co-BRICS member Brazil.

Russian media celebrated the remarkable achievement of Lomonosov Moscow State University in rising 35 places.

And, of course, the standard THE narrative was trotted out again. British universities are wonderful but they will only go on being wonderful if they are given as much money as they want and are allowed to admit as many overseas students as they want.

The latest rankings support this narrative of British excellence by showing Oxford and Cambridge overtaking Harvard, which was pushed into sixth place. But is such a claim believable? Has anything happened in the labs or lecture halls at any of those places between 2014 and 2015 to cause such a shift?

In reality, what probably happened was that the Oxbridge duo were not actually doing anything better this year but that Harvard’s eclipse came from a large drop from 92.9 to 83.6 points for THE’s composite teaching indicator. Did Harvard’s teaching really deteriorate over twelve months? It is more likely that there were relatively fewer American respondents in the THE survey but one cannot be sure because there are four other statistics bundled into the indicator.

While British universities appeared to do well, French ones appeared to perform disastrously. The École Normale Supérieure recorded a substantial gain going from 78^th to 54^th place but every other French institution in the rankings fell, sometimes by dozens of places. École Polytechnique went from 61^st place to 101^st, Université Paris-Sud from 120th  to 188^th , the University of Strasbourg from the 201-225 band to 301-350, in every case because of a substantial fall in the citations indicator. If switching to Scopus was intended to help non-English speaking countries it did not do France any good.

Meanwhile, the advance of Asia has apparently come to an end or gone into screeching reverse. Many Asian universities  slipped down the ladder although the top Chinese schools held their ground. Some Japanese and Korean universities fell dozens of places. The University of Tokyo went from 23^rd to 43^rd place, largely because of a fall in the citations indicator from 74.7 points to 60.9 and the University of Kyoto from 59th to 88th with another drop in the score for citations. Among the casualties was Tokyo Metropolitan University which used to advertise its perfect score of 100 for citations on the THE website. This year, stripped of the citations for mega-papers in physics, its citation score dropped to a rather tepid 72.2.

The Korean flagships have also foundered. Seoul National University fell 35 places and the Korean Advanced Institute of Technology 66, largely because of a decline in the scores for teaching and research. Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) fell 50 places, losing points in all indicators except income from industry

The most catastrophic fall was in Turkey. There were four Turkish universities in the top 200 last year. All of them have dropped out. Several Turkish universities contributed to the Large Hadron Collider project with its multiple authors and multiple citations and they also benefited from producing comparatively few research papers and from the regional modification, which gave them artificially high scores for the citations indicator in 2014 but not this year.

The worst case was Middle East Technical University which had the 85^th place in 2014, helped by an outstanding score of 92 for citations and reasonable scores for the other indicators. This year it was in the 501-600 band with reduced scores for everything except Industry Income and a very low score of 28.8 for citations.

The new rankings appear to have restored the privilege given to medical research. In the upper reaches we find St George’s, University of London, a medical school, which according to THE is the world's leading university for research impact,  Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin,  a teaching hospital affiliated to Humboldt University and the Free University of Berlin, and Oregon Health and Science University.

It also appears that THE's methodology continues to gives an undeserved advantage to small or specialized institutions such as Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, which does not appear to be a truly independent university,  the Copenhagen Business School, and Rush University in Chicago, the academic branch of a private hospital.

These rankings appear so far to have got a good reception in the mainstream press, although it is likely that that before long we will hear some negative reactions from independent experts and from Japan, Korea, France, Italy and the Middle East.

THE, however, have just postponed the hard decisions that they will eventually have to make.