Japanese Barbarians Out to Crush Humanities!

The international education media has been getting very excited recently about what appeared to be an extraordinary act of cultural vandalism by the Japanese Ministry of Education.

It seems that the ministry has been behaving like the Taliban on a rampage through the Louvre and has ordered public universities to stop teaching the humanities and social sciences.

Noah Smith, an Assistant Professor of Finance at Stony Brook University SUNY and a freelance writer, wrote that public universities had been ordered to stop teaching social sciences, humanities and law, although apparently the "order" was non-binding.

Meanwhile Takamitsu Sawa announced in the Japan Times that the humanities were under attack and that someone on the ministry's panel of learned persons had said that students should study accounting software instead of Samuelson's Economics and translation instead of Shakespeare.

Eventually,  the Financial Times revealed that that the ministry had been misinterpreted and that the abolition of the humanities referred to a number of unneeded teacher training programs. This was supported by an authoritative comment by a former government official.

So it seems  that Samuelson and Shakespeare are safe from the rampage of utilitarian barbarians.

Perhaps Japanese universities can now adopt the best practices of Columbia and the University at Buffalo for the teaching of art.

Latest on the THE Rankings Methodology

Times Higher Education (THE) have now officially announced the methodology of next week's World University Rankings. There are some changes although major problems are still not addressed.

First, THE is now getting data from Scopus rather than Thomson Reuters. The Scopus database is more inclusive -- it covers 22,000 publications compared to 12,000 -- and includes more papers from non-English speaking countries so this may give an advantage to some universities in Eastern Europe and Asia.

Second, THE has tried to make its reputation survey more inclusive, making forms available in an additional six languages and reducing the bias to the USA.

Third, 649 papers with more than 1,000 listed authors, mainly in physics, will not be counted for the citations indicator.

Fourth, the citations indicator will be divided into two with equal weighting. One half will be be with and one half without the "regional modification" by which the overall citations impact score of a university is divided by the square root of the score for the country in which it is located. In previous editions of these rankings this modification gave a big boost to universities in low scoring countries such as Chile, India, Turkey and Russia.

It is likely that Institutions such as Bogazici University, Panjab University, Federico Santa Maria Technical University and Universite Cadi Ayyad, which have benefited from contributing to mega-papers such as those emanating from the Large Hadron Collider project,will suffer from the exclusion of these papers from the citations indicator. Their pain will be increased by the dilution of the regional modification.

It is possible that such places may get some compensation in the form of more responses in the reputation survey or higher publication counts in the Scopus database but that is far from certain. I suspect that several university administrators are going to be very miserable next Thursday.

There is something else that should not be forgotten. The scores published by THE are not raw data but standardised scores derived from standard deviations and means. Since THE are including more universities in this year's rankings and since most of them are likely to have low scores for most indicators it follows that the overall mean scores of ranked universities will fall. This will have the effect of raising the standardised scores of the 400 or so universities that score above the mean. It is likely that this effect will vary from indicator to indicator and so the final overall scores will be even more unpredictable and volatile.

Looking Inside the Engine: The Structure of the Round University Rankings

Many of those interested in international university rankings have been frustrated by the lack of transparency in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and the Times Higher Education (THE) rankings .

The QS rankings assign a fifty per cent weighting to two surveys collected from a variety of channels -- I think six for the employer survey and five for the academic survey -- with different and fluctuating response rates.

The THE rankings have lumped five indicators in a Teaching cluster, three in a Research cluster and three in an International cluster. So how can anyone figure out just what is causing a university to rise or fall in the rankings?

A major step forward in transparency has now come with the recent publication of the Round University Rankings (RUR) by a Russian organisation that uses data from Thomson Reuters (TR), who provided the data for the Times Higher Education world and regional rankings from 2009 until the end of last year.

RUR have published the separate scores for all of the indicators. They have retained 12 out of the 13 indicators used in the THE rankings from 2011 to 2014, dropping income from industry as a percentage of research income, and added another eight.

I doubt that RUR could afford to pay TR very much for the data and I suspect that TR's motive in allowing the dissemination of such a large amount of information is to preempt THE or anyone else trying to move upstream in the drive to monetise data.

It is now possible to see whether the various indicators are measuring the same thing and hence are redundant, whether and to what extent  they are associated with other indicators and whether there is any link between markers of input and markers of output.

Here is a crude analysis of a very small sample of sixteen, one in fifty, of the RUR rankings starting with Harvard and ending with the Latvia Transport and Telecom Institute. I hope that a more detailed analysis of the entire corpus can be done in a few weeks.

The combined indicator groups

Three groups, Teaching, Research, Financial Sustainability, are fairly closely associated with one another. The teaching cluster correlates .634 with Research and .735 with Financial Sustainability. Research correlates .702 with Financial Sustainability.

The International Diversity group appears to be the odd one out here. It correlates significantly with Research (.555) but not with Teaching or Financial Sustainability. This suggests that internationalisation, at least in the form of recruiting more international students, may not always be a strong marker of quality.


The Reputation Indicators

Looking at the three reputation indicators, teaching, international teaching and research, we can see that for practical purposes they are measuring the same thing. The correlation between the Research Reputation and Teaching Reputation scores is .986 and between Research Reputation and International Teaching Reputation .925. Between Teaching Reputation and International Teaching Reputation it is .941.

Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates has claimed a correlation of .99 between teaching and research reputation scores in the THE rankings up to 2014. The figures from the RUR rankings are a bit lower but essentially the reputation indicators are measuring the same thing, whatever it is, and there is no need to count them more than once.

Other Unnecessary Indicators

Turning to the international indicators, the correlation between Academic Staff per Students and Academic Staff per Bachelor Degrees is very close at .834. The latter, which has not been in any previous ranking, could be omitted without a significant loss of information,

There is an extremely high correlation, .989,  between Citations per Academic and Research Staff and Papers per Academic and Research Staff. It sounds rather counter-intuitive but it seems that as measure of research productivity one is as good as the other, at least when dealing with more than a few hundred elite universities

There is a correlation of .906 between  Institutional Income  per Academic Staff and Institutional Income per Student.

It would appear then that the THE rankings of 2011-2014 with 13 indicators had passed the point beyond which additional indicators become redundant and provide no additional information.

Input and Outputs

There are some clues  about the possible relationship between indicators that could be regarded as inputs and those that might be counted as outputs.

Academic Staff per Student does not  significantly affect teaching reputation (.350, sig .183). It is positively and significantly associated only with doctoral degrees per bachelor degrees  (.510). The correlation with the overall score is, however, quite high and significant at .552.

There is some evidence that a diverse international faculty might have a positive impact on research output and quality. The correlations between International Faculty and Normalised Citation Impact, Papers per Academic and Research Staff and the overall score are positive and significant. On the other hand, the correlations between international collaboration and overall score and international students and overall score are weak and insignificant.

Money seems to help at least as as far as research is concerned. There are moderately high and significant correlations between International Income per Academic Staff and Citations per Academic and Research Staff, Papers per Academic and Research Staff, Normalised Citation Impact and the overall score.

Research Income per Academic Staff correlates highly and significantly with Teaching Reputation, International Teaching Reputation, Research Reputation, Citations per Academic  and Research Staff, Papers per Academic and Research Staff, Normalised Citation Impact and the overall score.

Who's Interested in the QS World University Rankings?

And here are the first ten results (excluding this blog and the QS page) from a Google search for this year's QS world rankings. Compare with ARWU and RUR. Does anyone notice any patterns?

Canada falls in World University Rankings' 2015 list

UBC places 50th, SFU 225th in QS World University Rankings

QS ranks MIT the world's top university for 2015-16

Queen's University, Belfast, falls in QS World University Rankings

Swinburne in 2015 QS World University Rankings

Swansea University breaks into top 400 in QS World University Rankings

TCD and UCD drop lower in world university rankings

Huge leap on prestigious QS World University Rankings

NUS, NTU rise to top 15 in QS world university rankings

Durham rises 31 places in world rankings

Who's interested in the Round University Rankings?

The top results from a Google search for responses to the recently published Round Universities Rankings 

New Ranking from Russia

CEU Ranked 182 in Round University Ranking

Out Round University Rankings-2015 (RUR-2015)

BSU in the regular time in the list of the strongest universities of the world

Out of international rankings of universities Round University Ranking (RUR) in 2015

Institute Lobachevskian entered the top 800 best universities in the world

Baku State University (BSU) in the prestigious ranking of the universities ..

8 Ukrainian universities are marked in the top 750 best world educational institutions

Russian universities are leading in the quality of education among the BRICS countries

Who's Interrested in the Shanghai Rankings?

First results from a Google search for responses to the latest edition of the Shanghai world rankings.

Radboud University: 132nd place on ARWU/Shanghai ranking 2015

America dominates, China rises in Shanghai rankings

Umeå University in 2015 Shanghai Ranking of top world

Harvard, Stanford, MIT top 2015 Shanghai Ranking, Hebrew U 67th, Technion 18th in CS

2015 ARWU rankings: Berkeley is world’s top public university

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (the Shanghai rankings) covers the world, and an Irish ranking can be produced from the national sub-set of the data.

Copenhagen ranked fifth best non-Anglo university in the world

Shanghai Ranking: UvA’s Social Sciences once again best in the Netherlands

More Dutch universities in top 100 Shanghai Ranking

Birmingham ranked among the world's top 150 universities

The Italian Ranking Dance

As noted in the previous post, the latest QS world rankings have not been well received by the Italian blog ROARS. Their opinion of the reaction of  the Italian media and public was summarised by posting the following video

Who believes QS?

From the Italian site ROARS: Return on Academic Research (Google translation):


According to the ranking Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) in Siena that something would happen in a year they have lost 220 (two hundred) rankings. But Pavia and Turin have collapsed by over 150 people coming out of the top-500; They have lost more than 100 positions Pisa, Tor Vergata, Federico II of Naples, Milan Catholic, Genoa, Perugia and Bicocca. The meltdown is simply due to the fact that QS has changed the methodology used in its construction ranking. Gaining places only the Polytechnics of Milan and Turin, as provided by Richard Holmes more than a month ago, when the news was spread of the change in methodology. I hope that the collapse of the Italian university in 2015 "certified" by QS and caused by the change of methodology, be a lesson: the rankings are not a serious way to evaluate the performance of universities.Unfortunately, judging from press and of POLIMI POLITO, it seems that the lesson has been helpful.

University Quality and Bias

Anticipating requests, here is the link for a significant paper by Christopher Claassen of the University of Essex.

Measuring University Quality by Christopher Claassen


http://www.chrisclaassen.com/University_rankings.pdf

Auto-Induced Fly Catching

Taking a break from the most exciting or second most exciting educational event this month, I have just received a message from Google Scholar Citations asking if I wanted to add the following to my profile:

AUTO-INDUCED FLY-CATCHING IN KING CHARLES SPANIEL

JG LANE, RJ Holmes

BRITISH VETERINARY JOURNAL 128 (9), 477-&, 1972

Unfortunately, I couldn't claim credit for this work. In 1972 I was still immersed in the Irish Home Rule Debate and the rise of the Sokoto Caliphate.

I wonder whether this was an attempt to develop an environmentally friendly form of pest control or is this a serious mental disorder among certain kinds of dogs?

Is it too late to submit a nomination for the IgNobel awards?

Global Ranking From Russia

A very interesting new set of global rankings appeared seven days ago, the Round University Ranking from Russia. The organization is rather mysterious, although probably not so much in Russia and nearby places.

The rankings are based entirely on data from Thomson Reuters (TR) and the structure and methodology are similar to last year's Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. They include 12 out of the 13 indicators used in the 2014 THE rankings, with only the percentage of research income derived from industry omitted. There are eight more measures making a total of twenty, five each  for teaching, research, international diversity and financial sustainability.

There is a normalized citations indicator with a weighting of only eight per cent, balanced by a simple count of citations per academic and research staff, also with eight per cent.

Altogether the three reputation indicators count for 18 per cent of the weighting compared to 33 per cent in the 2014 THE rankings or 50 per cent  in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) world rankings

To date these rankings appear to have been ignored by the world media except in Russia and its neighbors. Compared to the excitement with which the THE or even the QS or Shanghai rankings are greeted this might seem a bit odd. If the THE rankings were sophisticated  because they had 13 indicators then these are even more so with 20. If the THE rankings were trusted because they were powered by Thomson Reuters so are these. If the survey in the THE rankings was real social science then so is this.

Could it be that the THE rankings are beloved of the Russell Group and its like around the world not because of their robustness, comprehensiveness, transparency or superior methodology but because of the glamour derived from a succession of prestigious events, networking dinners and exclusive masterclasses designed to appeal to the status anxieties of upwardly or downwardly mobile university administrators?

There are some problems with the RUR rankings. There is incoherence about what the indicators are supposed to measure.The methodology says that '[I]t is assumed that "undergraduate" level is the core of higher education' so there is an indicator measuring academic staff per bachelor degree.  But then we have a weighting of eight per cent for doctoral degrees per bachelor degrees.

One excellent thing about these rankings is that the score for all of the indicators can be found in the profiles of the individual universities. If anyone has the energy and time there are some important questions that could be answered . Is the correlation between teaching and research reputation so high that a distinction between the two is redundant? Is income or number of faculty a better prediction of research performance?

The presentation leaves a lot to be desired. Cooper League? The explanation of the methodology verges on the incomprehensible. Can somebody tell RUR to get a competent human to translate for them and forget about the Google Translator?

The economics of the relationship between TR and RUR are puzzling. There are no obvious signs that RUR has a large income from which to pay TR for the data and  I doubt that TR has passed it on for purely altruistic reasons. Could it be that TR are simply trying to undercut THE's attempt to go it alone? If nothing else, it could undermine any THE plans to go into the benchmarking and consulting trade.

Anyway,  here are some first places. No surprises here, except maybe for Scuola Superiore Normale Pisa. You can find out exactly where the strengths of that school are by checking the scores for the twenty indicators.


Overall:                              Harvard
Teaching:                           Caltech
Research:                           Chicago
International Diversity:     EPF Lausanne
Financial Sustainability:    Caltech

China:                     Peking 49th
Russia:                    Moscow State 187th
India:                      IIT Kharagpur  272nd
UK:                         ICL 5th
Germany:                Munich 22nd
France:                    Ecole Polytechnique   19th
Egypt:                     American University Cairo 571st
South Africa:          Cape Town  201st
Brazil:                     Sao Paulo 65th
Italy:                       Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa 66th
Turkey:                   METU 308th
Malaysia:                Universiti Putra Malaysia 513th
Australia:                ANU 77th
Japan:                     Tokyo 47th
Korea:                     KAIST  41st.

More on Alternative Indicators for Ranking African Universities

Continuing with our exploration of how to rank universities outside the world's top 200 or 400 where it is necessary to develop robust and sophisticated techniques of standardisation, normalisation, scaling, regional modification, taking away the number you first thought of (just kidding) verification, weighting and validation to figure out that Caltech's  normalised research impact is slightly better than Harvard's or that Cambridge is a bit more international than that place in the other Cambridge, here is a ranking of African universities according to recommendations in LinkedIn.

There are obvious problems with this indicator, not least of which is the tiny number of responses compared to all the students on the continent. It might, however, be the precursor to a useful survey of student opinion or graduate employability later on.

First place goes to the University of South Africa, an open distance education institution whose alumni include Nelson Mandela, Cyril Ramaphosa and Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Makerere University, the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University do well.

Data was compiled on the 28th and 29th of July. All universities included in the THE experimental African ranking, the top fifty African universities in Webometrics plus the top universities in Webometrics or 4icu of any country still nor included.

Rank	University	Country	Number of LinkedIn Recommendations
1	University of South Africa	South Africa	154
2	Makerere University	Uganda	116
3	University of the Witwatersrand	South Africa	94
4	University of Ibadan	Nigeria	86
5	University of Johannesburg	South Africa	79
6	University of Nairobi	Kenya	75
7	Cairo University	Egypt	67
8	Stellenbosch University	South Africa	63
9	University of Pretoria	South Africa	62
10	Kenyatta University	Kenya	61
11	University of Cape Town	South Africa	60
12	University of Lagos	Nigeria	58
13	Addis Ababa University	Ethiopia	55
14	Obafemi Awolowo University	Nigeria	50
15	Alexandria University	Egypt	47
16	Rhodes University	South Africa	42
17	Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology	Kenya	40
18	American University in Cairo	Egypt	28
19	University of Kwazulu-Natal	South Africa	26
20	University of Ilorin	Nigeria	24
21	University of Zimbabwe	Zimbabwe	22
22	Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology	Ghana	21
23	Helwan University	Egypt	20
24=	North West University	South Africa	18
24=	University of Ghana	Ghana	18
24=	University of Port Harcourt	Nigeria	18
27=	Durban University of Technology	South Africa	16
27=	University of Dar Es Salaam	Tanzania	16
29=	Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University	South Africa	14
29=	University of the Western Cape	South Africa	14
31	Cape Peninsula University of Technology	South Africa	13
32	Mansoura university	Egypt	12
33	University of Botswana	Botswana	10
34	Covenant University	Nigeria	9
35=	Zagazig University	Egypt	7
35=	Suez Canal university	Egypt	7
37	Tanta University	Egypt	6
38=	Assiut University	Egypt	5
38=	Université Constantine 1	Algeria	5
40=	University of the Free State	South Africa	4
40=	Universite des Sciences et de la Technologie Houari Boumediene	Algeria	4
42+	South Valley University	Egypt	3
42+	Université Cadi Ayyad	Morocco	2
42+	University ofTunis	Tunisia	2
42+	University of Namibia	Namibia	1
42+	University of Mauritius	Mauritius	1
42+	Université Cheikh Anta Diop	Senegal	0
42+	Université Mohammed V Souissi	Morocco	0
42+	University of Khartoum	Sudan	0
42+	University of Malawi	Malawi	0
42+	Université Hassan II Ain Chock	Morocco	0
42+	Kafrelsheikh University	Egypt	0
42+	University of Zambia	Zambia	0
42+	Bejaia university	Algeria	0
42+	Minia University	Egypt	0
42+	Benha University	Egypt	0
42+	Universidade Católica de Angola	Angola	0
42+	Université de Lomé	Togo	0
42+	Université Abou Bekr Belkaid	Algeria	0
42+	Beni-Suef University	Egypt	0
42+	Université Omar Bongo	Gabon	0
42+	University of the Gambia	Gambia	0
42+	Université de Toliara	Madagascar	0
42+	Université Kasdi Merbah Ouarg	Algeria	0
42+	Universite de la Reunion	Reunion	0
42+	Université d'Abomey-Calavi	Benin	0
42+	Universidade Eduardo Mondlane	Mozambique	0
42+	Université de Ouagadougou	Burkina Faso	0
42+	University of Rwanda	Rwanda	0
42+	Universite de Bamako	Mali	0
42+	University of Swaziland	Swaziland	0
42+	Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny	Ivory Coast	0
42+	Université de Kinshasa	Democratic Republic of the Congo	0
42+	National University of Lesotho	Lesotho	0
42+	Universidade Jean Piaget de Cabo Verde	Cape Verde	0
42+	N Engineering S of Sfax	Tunisia	0
42+	Université Marien Ngouabi	Republic of the Congo	0
42+	University of Liberia	Liberia	0
42+	Université Djillali Liabes	Algeria	0
42+	Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey	Niger	0
42+	Misurata University	Libya	0
42+	Université de Dschang	Cameroons	0
42+	Université de Bangui	Central African Republic	0
42+	Université de Nouakchott	Mauritania	0
42+	Eritrea Institute of Technology	Eritrea	0
42+	Université de Djibouti	Djibouti	0
42+	University of Seychelles	Seychelles	0
42+	Mogadishu University	Somalia	0
42+	Universidad Nacional de Guinea Ecuatorial	Equatorial Guinea	0
42+	Universite Gamal Abdel Nasser de Conakry	Guinea	0
42+	University of Makeni	Sierra Leone	0
42+	John Garang Memorial University	South Sudan	0
42+	Hope Africa University	Burundi	0
42+	Universite de Moundou	Chad	0
42+	Universite de Yaounde I	Cameroons	0

Best German and Austrian Universities if you Want to get Rich

If you want to go a university in Germany or Austria and get rich afterwards, the website Wealth-X has a ranking for you. It counts the number of UHNW (ultra high net worth) alumni, those with US$ 30 million or above.

Here are the top five with the number of UHNW individuals in brackets.

1. University of Cologne     (18)
2. University of Munich      (14)
3. University of Hamburg    (13)
4. University of Freiburg     (11)
5. University of Bonn          (11)

There may well be protests about who should be first. In tenth place is "Ludwig Maximilians University Munich (LMU Munich)", which I assume is another name for the University of Munich, with six UHNW alumni .

Update on changes in ranking methodology

Times Higher Education (THE) have been preparing the ground for methodological changes in their world rankings. A recent article by Phil Baty  announced that the new world rankings scheduled for September 30 will not count the citations to 649 papers, mainly in particle physics, with more than 1000 authors.

This is perhaps the best that is technically and/or commercially feasible at this moment but it is far from satisfactory. Some of these publications are dealing with the most basic questions about the nature of physical reality and it is a serious distortion not to include them in the ranking methodology. There have been complaints about this. Pavel Krokovny's comment was noted in a previous post while Mete Yeyisoglu argues that:

"Fractional counting is the ultimate solution. I wish you could have worked it out to use fractional counting for the 2015-16 rankings.
The current interim approach you came up with is objectionable.
Why 1,000 authors? How was the limit set? What about 999 authored-articles?
Although the institution I work for will probably benefit from this interim approach, I think you should have kept the same old methodology until you come up with an ultimate solution.
This year's interim fluctuation will adversely affect the image of university rankings."

Baty provides a reasonable answer to the question why the cut-off point is 1,000 authors.

But there is a fundamental issue developing here that goes beyond ranking procedure. The concept of authorship of a philosophy paper written entirely by a single person or a sociological study from a small research team is very different from that of the huge multi-national capital and labour intensive publications in which the number of collaborating institutions exceeds the number of  paragraphs and there are more authors than sentences.

Fractional counting does seem to be the only fair and sensible way forward and it is now apparently on THE's agenda although they have still not committed themselves.

The objection could be raised that while the current THE system gives a huge reward to even the least significant contributing institution, fractional counting would give major research universities insufficient credit for their role in important research projects.

A long term solution might be to draw a distinction between the contributors to and the authors of the mega papers. For most publications there would be no need to draw such a distinction but for those with some sort of input from dozens, hundreds or thousands of people it might be feasible for to allot half the credit to all those who had anything to do with the project and the other half to those who meet the standard criteria of authorship. There would no doubt be a lot of politicking about who gets the credit but that would be nothing new.

Duncan Ross, the new Data and Analytics Director at THE, seems to be thinking along these lines.

"In the longer term there are one technical and one structural approach that would be viable.  The technical approach is to use a fractional counting approach (2932 authors? Well you each get 0.034% of the credit).  The structural approach is more of a long term solution: to persuade the academic community to adopt metadata that adequately explains the relationship of individuals to the paper that they are ‘authoring’.  Unfortunately I’m not holding my breath on that one."

The counting of citations to mega papers is not the only problem with the THE citations indicator. Another is the practice of giving a boost to universities in underperforming countries. Another item by Phil Baty quotes this justification from Thomson Reuters, THE's former data partner.

“The concept of the regional modification is to overcome the differences between publication and citation behaviour between different countries and regions. For example some regions will have English as their primary language and all the publications will be in English, this will give them an advantage over a region that publishes some of its papers in other languages (because non-English publications will have a limited audience of readers and therefore a limited ability to be cited). There are also factors to consider such as the size of the research network in that region, the ability of its researchers and academics to network at conferences and the local research, evaluation and funding policies that may influence publishing practice.”

THE now appear to agree that this is indefensible in the long run and hope that a more inclusive academic survey and the shift to Scopus, with broader coverage than the Web of Science, will lead to this adjustment being phased out.

It is a bit odd that TR and THE should have introduced income, in three separate indicators, and international outlook, in another three, as markers of excellence, but then included a regional modification to compensate for limited funding and international contacts.

THE are to be congratulated for having put fractional counting and phasing out the regional modification on their agenda. Let's hope it doesn't take too long.

While we are on the topic, there are some more things about the citation indicator to think about . First, to repeat a couple of points mentioned in the earlier post.

• Reducing the number of fields or doing away with normalisation by year of citation. The more boxes into which any given citation can be dropped the greater the chance of statistical anomalies when a cluster of citations meets a low world average of citations for that particular year of citations, year of publication and field (300 in Scopus?)

• Reducing the weighting for this indicator. Perhaps citations per paper normalized by field is a useful instrument for comparing the quality of research of MIT, Caltech, Harvard and the like but it might be of little value when comparing the research performance of Panjab University and IIT Bombay or Istanbul University and  Bogazici.

Some other things THE could think about.

• Adding a measure of overall research impact, perhaps simply by counting citations. At the very least stop calling field- and year- normalised regionally modified citations per paper a measure of research impact. Call it research quality or something like that.

• Doing something about secondary affiliations. So far this seems to have been a problem mainly  for the Highly Cited Researchers indicator in the Shanghai ARWU but it may not be very long before more universities realise  that a few million dollars for adjunct faculty could have a disproportion impact on publication and citation counts.

• Also, perhaps THE should consider excluding self-citations (or even citations within the same institution although that would obviously be technically difficult). Self-citation caused a problem in 2010 when Dr El Naschie's diligent citation of himself and a few friends lifted Alexandria University to fourth place in the world for research impact. Something similar might happen again now that THE are using a larger and less selective database.

The Richest University in China ...

   ...   is Tsinghua University but Zhejiang, Peking and Shanghai Jiao Tong Universities appear to be more productive, as measured by the Publications indicator in the Shanghai rankings.

China Daily has just published a list of the top ten universities in China ranked according to annual income as reported to the Ministry of Education. Here they are with the Publications score (papers in the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index in 2014) in brackets.


1.     Tsinghua University 17.56 billion yuan (63.8)
2.     Zhejiang University 15.64 billion yuan  (68.5)
3.     Peking University 12.85 billion yuan      (64)
4.     Shanghai Jiao Tong University 11.89 billion yuan   (68.5)
5.     Fudan University 7.71 billion yuan (56.1)
6.     Wuhan University 6.83 billion yuan (45.8)
7.     Jilin University 6.82 billion yuan  (50.7)
8.     Huazhong University of Science and Technology 6.81 billion yuan  (53.1)
9.     Sun Yat-sen University 6.69 billion yuan (54.9)
10.   Sichuan University 6.58 billion yuan    (54.2).

Not fair to call papers freaky

A comment by Pavel Krokovny of Heidelberg University about THE's proposal to exclude papers with 1,000+ authors from their citations indicator in the World University Rankings.

"It is true that all 3k+ authors do not draft the paper together, on the contrary, only a small part of them are involved in this very final step of a giant research work leading to a sound result. It is as well true that making the research performed public and disseminating the knowledge obtained is a crucial step of the whole project. 
But what you probably missed is that this key stage would not be possible at all without a unique setup which was built and operated by profoundly more physicists and engineers than those who processed raw data and wrote a paper. Without that "hidden part of the iceberg" there would be no results at all. And it would be completely wrong to assume that the authors who did the data analysis and wrote the paper should be given the highest credit in the paper. It is very specific for the experimental HEP field that has gone far beyond the situation that was common still in the first half of 20th century when one scientist or a small group of them might produce some interesting results. The "insignificant" right tail in your distribution of papers on number of coauthors contains the hot part of the modern physics with high impact results topped by the discovery of Higgs-boson. And in your next rankings you are going to dishonour those universities that contributed to this discovery."

and

"the point is that frequent fluctuations of the ranking methodology might damage the credibility of the THE. Certainly, I do not imply here large and well-esteemed universities like Harvard or MIT. I believe their high rankings positions not to be affected by nearly any reasonable changes in the methodology. However, the highest attention to the rankings is attracted from numerous ordinary institutions across the world and their potential applicants and employees. In my opinion, these are the most concerned customers of the THE product. As I already pointed out above, it's very questionable whether participation in large HEP experiments (or genome studies) should be considered "unfair" for those institutions."

Changes in Ranking Methodology

This year and next the international university rankings appear to be set for more volatility with unusually large upward and downward movement, partly as a result of changes to the methodology for counting citations in the QS and THE rankings.

ARWU

The global ranking season kicked off last week with the publication of the latest edition of the Academic Ranking of World Universities from the ShanghaiRanking Consultancy (SRC), which I hope to discuss in detail in a little while. These rankings are rather dull and boring, which is exactly what they should be. Harvard is, as always, number one for all but one of the indicators. Oxford has slipped from joint ninth to tenth place. Warwick has leaped into the top 100 by virtue of a Fields medal. At the foot of the table there are new contenders from France, Korea and Iran.

Since they began in 2003 the Shanghai rankings have been characterised by a  generally stable methodology. In 2012, however, they had to deal with the recruitment of a large and unprecedented number of adjunct faculty by King Abdulaziz University. Previously SRC had simply divided the credit for the Highly Cited Researchers indicator equally between all institutions listed as affiliations. In 2012 and 2013 they wrote to all highly cited researchers with joint affiliations and thus determined the division of credit between primary and secondary affiliations. Then, in 2014 and this year they combined the old Thomson Reuters list, first issued in 2001, and the new one, issued in 2014, and excluded all secondary affiliations in the new list.

The result was that in 2014 the rankings showed an unusual degree of volatility although this year things are a lot more stable. My understanding is that Shanghai will move to counting only the new list next year, again without secondary affiliations, so there should be a lot of interesting changes then. It looks as though Stanford, Princeton, University of Wisconsin -- Madison, and Kyoto University will suffer because of the change while University of California Santa Cruz, Rice University, University of Exeter and University of Wollongong. will benefit.

While SRC has efficiently dealt with the issue of secondary affiliation with regard to its Highly Cited indicator, the issue has now resurfaced in the unusual high scores achieved  by King Abdulaziz University for publications largely because of its adjunct faculty. Expect more discussion over the next year or so. It would seem sensible for SRC to think about a five or ten year period rather than one year for their Publications indicator and academic publishers, the media and rankers in general may need to give some thought to the proliferation of secondary affiliations.


QS

On July 27 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) announced that for 18 months they had been thinking about normalising the counting of citations across five broad subject areas. They observed that a typical institution would receive about half of its citations from the life sciences and medicine, over a quarter from the natural sciences but just 1% from the arts and humanities.

In their forthcoming rankings QS will assign a 20% weighting for citations to each of the five subject areas something, according to Ben Sowter Research Director at QS, that they have been doing for the academic opinion survey.

It would seem then that there are likely to be some big rises and big falls this September. I would guess that places strong in humanities, social sciences and engineering like LSE, New York University and Nanyang Technological University may go up and some of the large US state universities and Russian institutions may go down. That's a guess because it is difficult to tell what happens with the academic and employer surveys.

QS have also made an attempt to deal with the issue of hugely cited papers with hundreds, even thousands of "authors" -- contributors would be a better term -- mainly in physics, medicine and genetics. Their approach is to exclude all papers with more than 10 contributing institutions, that is 0.34% of all publications in the database.

This is rather disappointing. Papers with huge numbers of authors and citations obviously do have distorting effects but they have often dealt with fundamental and important issues. To exclude them altogether is to ignore a very significant body of research.

The obvious solution to the problem of multi-contributor papers is fractional counting, dividing the number of citations by the number of contributors or contributing institutions. QS claim that to do so would discourage collaboration, which does not sound very plausible.

In addition, QS will likely extend the life of  survey responses from three to five years. That could make the rankings more stable by smoothing out annual fluctuations in survey responses and reduce the volatility caused by the proposed changes in the counting of citations.

The shift to a moderate version of field normalisation is helpful as it will reduce the undue privilege given to medical research, without falling into the huge problems that result from using too many categories. It is unfortunate, however, that QS have not taken the plunge into fractional counting. One suspects that technical problems and financial considerations might be as significant as the altruistic desire not to discourage collaboration.

After a resorting in September the QS rankings are likely to become a bit more stable and and credible but their most serious problem, the structure, validity and excessive weighting of the academic survey, has still not been addressed.

THE

Meanwhile, Times Higher Education (THE) has also been grappling with the issue of authorship inflation. Phil Baty has announced that this year 649 papers with over 1,000 authors will be excluded from their calculation of citations because " we consider them to be so freakish that they have the potential to distort the global scientific landscape".

But it is not the papers that do the distorting. It is  methodology.  THE and their former data partners Thomson Reuters, like QS, have avoided  fractional counting (except for a small experimental African ranking) and so every one of those hundreds or thousands of authors gets full credit for the hundreds  or thousands of citations. This has given places like Tokyo Metropolitan University, Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa, Universite Cadi Ayyad in Morocco and Bogazici University in Turkey remarkably high scores  for Citations: Research Impact, much higher than their scores for the bundled research indicators.

THE have decided to simply exclude 649 papers, 0r 0.006% of the total from their calculations for the world rankings. This seems a lot less than QS. Again, this is a rather crude measure. Many of the "freaks" are major contributions to advanced research and deserve to be acknowledged by the rankings in some way. 

THE did use fractional counting in their recent experimental ranking of African universities and Baty indicates that they are considering doing so in the future.

It would be a big step forward for THE if they introduce fractional counting of citations. But they should not stop there. There are other bugs in the citations indicator that ought to be fixed.

First, it does not at present measure what it is supposed to measure. It does not measure a university's overall research impact. At best, it is a measure of the average quality of research papers no matter how few (above a certain threshold) they are.

Second, the "regional modification", which divides the university citation impact score by the square root of the the score of the country where the university is located, is another source  of distortion. It gives a bonus to universities simply for being located in  underperforming countries. THE or TR have justified the modification by suggesting that some universities deserve compensation because they lack funding or networking opportunities. Perhaps they do, but this can still lead to serious anomalies.

Thirdly, THE need to consider whether they should assign citations to so many fields since this increases the distortions that can arise when there is a highly cited paper in a normally lowly cited field.

Fourthly, should they assign a thirty per cent weighting to an indicator that may be useful for distinguishing between the likes of MIT and Caltech but may be of little relevance for the universities that are now signing up for the world rankings?

Research Ranking of African Universities

I suppose it should no longer be surprising that university heads flock to Johannesburg for the unveiling of an "experimental" research ranking of 30 African universities that put the University of Port Harcourt in 6th place, did not include Cairo University, the University of Ibadan, Ahmadu Bello University or the University of Nigeria Nsukka, placed Makerere above Stellenbosch and Universite Cadi Ayyad above the University of Pretoria.

It is still a bit odd that African universities seem to have  ignored a reasonable and sensible research ranking from the Journals Consortium that I found while reading an article by Gerald Ouma in the Mail and Guardian Africa, which, by the way, had an advertisement about Universite Cadi Ayyad being number ten in the THE African ranking.

The Journals Consortium ranking is based on publications, citations and web visibility and altogether 1,447 institutions are ranked. The methodology, which is a bit thin, is here.

Here are the top ten.
1.   University of Cape Town
2.   Cairo University
3.   University of Pretoria
4.   University of Nairobi
5.   University of South Africa
6.   University of the Witwatersrand
7.   Stellenbosch University
8.   University of Ibadan
9.   University of Kwazulu-Natal
10. Ain Shams University

The University of Port Harcourt is 36th and Universite Cadi Ayyad is 89th.

I am pleased to note that two of my former employers are in the rankings, University of Maiduguri in 66th place and Umar ibn Ibrahim El-Kanemi College of Education, Science and Technology (formerly Borno College of Basic Studies) in 988th.

This is also really frightening

From The Times, which is supposed to be a really posh paper -- I remember adverts "Top People Read the Times" -- read by people with degrees from Russell Group universities:

"Of the 3 million Muslims in Britain, about 2.3 million identify as Sunni, compared with 300,000 Shias, or 5 per cent of the total. Most British Shias have roots in Iran, Iraq, Azer­baijan or ­Bahrain. Sunnis make up the vast majority of Muslims worldwide."

This is really frightening

The evidence that human intelligence is falling continues to accumulate. PISA scores in Sweden are down and not just among immigrants. The intelligence of US marines, as measured by the General Classification Test, has been in decline since the 1980s. Based on "a small, probably representative sample" the French national IQ has dropped since 1999.

And now we have this from an article about the possible revival of the Liberal Democrats by Jon Stone, who is a reporter, in the Independent, which is a newspaper.

"Lazarus is a character in the Christian holy book The Bible who comes back from the dead after an intervention by Jesus Christ, a religious figure."

I thought the Independent was one of the posh papers read by bright people who had degrees and knew how ignorant and illiterate UKIP supporters were.

Does Jon Stone really think he has to explain to his readers what the Bible is? Or is this some sort of PC policy?

The worse thing is that he apparently doesn't know that Lazarus was really a character in a Robert Heinlein novel.

The Plague of Authorship Inflation

An article in the Wall Street Journal by Robert Lee Hotz describes the apparently inexorable increase in the number of authors of scientific papers.

In 2014 according to the Web of Science the number of papers with 50 or more authors reached over 1400 and the number with 500 or more was over 200. The situation is getting so bad that one journal, Nature, was unable to list all the autors of a paper in the print edition .

Hotz has an amusing digression where he recounts how scientists have listed a hamster, a dog and a computer as co-authors

One issue that he does not explore is the way in which multi-authorship has distorted global university rankings. Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuters until this year declined to use fractional counting of citations in their World University Rankings so that every one of hundreds of contributors was credited with every one of thousands of citations. When this was combined with normalisation by 250 fields so that a few citations could have a disproportionate effect and a deceptive regional modification that rewarded universities for being in a country that produced few citations then the results could be ludicrous. Unproductive institutions, for example Alexandria University, those that are very small,  for example Scuala Normale Superiore Pisa, or very specialised, for example Moscow State Engineering Physics Institute, have been presented by THE as world leaders for research  impact.

Let us hope that this indicator is reformed in the forthcoming world rankings.