The long wait for the THE rankings is nearly over ...

but we can still have some fun reading the latest post at ROARS by Guiseppe de Nicolao.

Times Higher Education still changes the rules: a little help at Oxford and Cambridge? And the Italian?

Update on previous post

The reputation data used by THE in the 2016 world rankings, for which the world is breathlessly waiting, is that which was used in their reputation rankings  released last May and collected between January and March.

Therefore, the distribution of responses from disciplinary groups this year was 9% for the arts and humanities and 15% for social sciences and 13% for business (28% for the last two combined). In 2015 it was 16% for the arts and humanities and 19% for the social sciences (which then included business).

Since UK universities are relatively strong in the humanities and Asian universities relatively strong in business studies the result of this was a shift in the reputation rankings away from the UK and towards Asian universities. Oxford fell from 3rd (score 80.4) to 5th (score 69.1) in the reputation rankings and Bristol and Durham dropped out of the top 100 while Tsinghua University rose from 26th place to 18th, Peking University from 32nd to 21st and Seoul National University from 51-60 to 45th.

In the forthcoming world rankings British universities (although threatened by Brexit) ought to do better because of the inclusion of books in the publications and citations indicators and certain Asian universities, but by no means all, may do better because their citations for mega-projects will be partially restored.

Notice that THE have also said that this year they will combine the reputation scores for 2015 and 2016, something that is unprecedented. Presumably this will reduce the fall of UK universities in the reputation survey. Combined with the inclusion of books in the database, this may mean that UK universities may not fall this year and may even go up a bit (ATBB).  

Some predictions for the THE rankings and summit

Here are my predictions for the THE rankings on the 21st and academic summit on the 26th -28th.

• Donald Trump will not be invited to give a keynote address.

• The decline of US public universities will be blamed on government spending cuts.

• British universities will be found to be in mortal danger from Brexit and visa controls.

• Phil Baty will give a rankings "masterclass" but will have to apologise to feminists because he couldn't think of anything else to call it.

• The words 'prestige' and 'prestigious' will be used more times than in the novel by Christopher Priest or the film by Christopher Nolan

• The counting of books will help British universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, but they will still be threatened by Brexit.

• The partial reinclusion of citations of papers with 1,000+ authors, mainly in physics, will lead to a modest recovery of some universities in France, Korea, Japan and Turkey. The rise of Asia will resume.

• Since the host city or university of THE summits somehow manages to get in the top ten, Berkeley will recover from last year's fall to 13th place. 

• Last year the percentage of survey responses from the arts and humanities fell to 9% from 16%. I suspect that this year the fall might be reversed and that the reason THE are combining the reputation survey results for this year and 2015 is to reduce the swing back to UK universities, which are suffering because of visa controls and Brexit.

• At least one of the above will be wrong..