My Predictions for the Shanghai Rankings

Watch this Nate Silver.

In the latest edition of the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) to be announced on Monday, the first place will go to Harvard.

The methodology for this prediction is based on an extremely complex and sophisticated algorithm that incorporates a large number of variables and will remain a secret for the moment.

Now for some easier predictions.

The Shanghai rankings are generally famous for their stability and consistency which makes them rather boring for journalists and naive administrators. No shocking headlines about catastrophic plunges in the rankings after the latest vandalism by government Scrooges.

But the Shanghai rankers have had problems with their highly cited researchers indicator. Thomson Reuters have stopped adding to their old list of highly cited researchers and have published a new one. The Shanghai Ranking Consultancy combined the two lists in 2014 and 2015 and have said that this year only the new list will be used in calculating the overall score.

Last year Shanghai published a list of scores for the highly cited indicator in 2013 (the old list), combined scores in 2015 and scores if the new list alone had been used.

Here are the universities that will rise or fall by ten points (two points in the weighted overall rankings) as the new list replaces the combined lists. This assumes that universities have not recruited or lost highly cited researchers dring 2015. If they have then the predictions will be incorrect. Also, changes in the highly cited indicator may be balanced by changes in other indicators

Predicted to Fall
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Rutgers: State University of New Jersey
Virginia Polytechnic Institute

Predicted to Rise
Aalborg University
Nanyang Technological University
Peking University
Chiba University
Tsinghua University
University of Tehran