Shanghai Rankings 2016 Update

An interesting tweet from qwertzuiop   reports that the average change in rank position in this year's Shanghai rankings was 32 compared to 11.7 between 2014 and 2015. Changes in methodology, even simple ones, can lead to a lot of churning.

Meanwhile, here are the correlations between the various indicators in the ranking. In general, it seems that the indicators are not measuring exactly the same thing and they do not raise red flags by showing a low or zero association with each other.

The lowest correlations are between publications and alumni and award (alumni and faculty winning Nobel and Fields awards). Publications are papers in the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index in 2015 while the alumni and award indicators go back several decades. Time makes a difference and as a measure of contemporary research excellence Nobel and Fields awards may be losing their relevance.

	alumni	award	highly cited	Nature & Science	publications	PCP	total
alumni	1	.764	.480	.708	.439	.612	.783
award	.764	1	.544	.751	.403	.686	.846
highly cited	.480	.544	1	.738	.581	.588	.825
Nature & Science	.708	.751	.738	1	.628	.687	.925
publications	.439	.403	.581	.628	1	.394	.733
PCP	.612	.686	.588	.687	.394	1	.757
Total	.783	.846	.825	.925	.733	.757	1

All correlations are significant at the 0.01 level (2 tailed).
N is 500 in all cases except for Nature and Science where it is 497