Who Cares About University rankings?

A paper by Ludo Waltman and Nees Jan van Eck asks what users of the Leiden Ranking are interested in. There's some interesting stuff but for now I just want to look at where the users come from.

The top ten countries where visitors originate are:

1.  USA
2.  Australia
3.  Netherlands
4.  UK
5.  Turkey
6.  Iran
7.  South Korea
8.  France
9.  Germany
10. Denmark.

The authors consider the number of visitors from Australia, Turkey, Iran and South Korea to be "quite remarkable."

Let's look at other signs of interest in rankings. Here are the top countries for respondents to the 2018 QS academic survey:

1.  USA
2.  UK
3.  Malaysia
4= Australia
4= South Korea
4= Russia
7= Italy
7= Japan
9= Brazil
9= Canada

And here are the top ten countries for visitors to this blog:

1. USA
2. UK
3. Russia
4. France
5. Germany
6. Ukraine
7. Canada
8. Malaysia
9. Australia
10. Singapore.

The three countries on all three lists are UK, USA and Australia. The countries on two lists are South Korea, Russia, Malaysia, France, Germany and Canada.










https://www.cwts.nl/blog?article=n-r2s2a4&title=what-are-users-of-the-cwts-leiden-ranking-interested-in

http://rankingwatch.blogspot.com/2018/06/responses-to-qs.html