Towards a transparent university ranking system

For the last few years global university rankings have been getting more complicated and more "sophisticated".

Data makes it way from branch campuses, research institutes and far flung faculties and departments and is analysed, decomposed, recomposed, scrutinised for anomalies and outliers and then enters the files of the rankers where it is normalised, standardised, square rooted, weighted and/or subjected to regional modification. Sometimes what comes out the other end makes sense: Harvard in first place, Chinese high fliers flying higher. Sometimes it stretches academic credulity: Alexandria University in fourth place in the world for research impact, King Abdulaziz University in the world's top ten for mathematics.

The transparency of the various indicators in the global rankings varies. Checking the scores for Nature and Science papers and indexed publications in the Shanghai rankings is easy if you have access to the Web of Knowledge. It is also not difficult to check the numbers of faculty and students on the QS, Times Higher Education (THE)and US News web sites.

On the other hand, getting into the data behind the THE citations is close to impossible. Citations are normalised by field, year of publication and year of citation. Then, until last year the score for each university was adjusted by division by the square root of the citation impact score of the country in which it was located. Now this applies to half the score for the indicator. Reproducing the THE citations score is impossible for almost everybody since it requires calculating the world average citation score for 250 or 300 fields and then the total citation score for every country.

It is now possible to access third party data from sources such as Google, World Intellectual Property Organisation and various social media such as LinkedIn. One promising development is the creation of public citation profiles by Google Scholar.

The Cybermetrics Lab in Spain, publishers of the Webometrics Ranking Web of Universities, has announced the beta version of a ranking based on nearly one million individual profiles in the Google Scholar Citations database. The object is to see whether this data can be included in future editions of the Ranking Web of Universities

It uses data from the institutional profiles and counts the citations in the top ten public profiles for each institution, excluding the first profile.

The ranking is incomplete since many researchers and institutions have not participated fully. There are, for example, no Russian institutions in the top 600. In addition, there are technical issues such as the duplication of profiles.

The leading university is Harvard which is well ahead of its closest rival, the University of Chicago. English speaking universities are dominant with 17 of the top 20 places going to US institutions and three, Oxford, Cambridge and University College London, going to the UK.

Overall the top twenty are:

1.   Harvard University
2.   University of Chicago
3.   Stanford University
4.   University of California Berkeley
5.   Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
6.   University of Oxford
7.   University College London
8.   University of Cambridge
9.   Johns Hopkins University
10.   University of Michigan
11.   Michigan State University
12.   Yale University
13.   University of California San Diego
14.   UCLA
15.   Columbia University
16.   Duke University
17.   University of Washington
18.   Princeton University
19.   Carnegie Mellon University
20.   Washington University St Louis.

The top universities in selected countries and regions are:

Africa: University of Cape Town, South Africa 244^th

Arab Region: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia 148^th

Asia and Southeast Asia: National University of Singapore 40^th

Australia and Oceana: Australian National University 57^th

Canada: University of Toronto 22^nd

China: Zhejiang University 85^th

France: Université Paris 6 Pierre and Marie Curie 133^rd

Germany: Ludwig Maximilians Universität München 194^th

Japan: Kyoto University 100^th

Latin America: Universidade de São Paulo 164^th

Middle East: Hebrew University of Jerusalem 110^th

South Asia: Indian Institute of Science Bangalore 420^th.

This seems plausible and sensible so it is likely that the method could be extended and improved.