Yes, going to the library might be good for you

A study by Felly Chiteng Kot and Jennifer L. Jones has found that

"using a given library resource was associated with a small, but also meaningful, gain in first-term grade point average, net of other factors."

But, correlation does not necessarily mean causation. Could it be that bright people like to go to libraries?

Still, most students are likely to behave better in the library than other places, so let's not quibble too much.

Implications of the THE African Pilot Ranking

The most interesting thing about THE's experimental African ranking is the use of fractionalised counting of citations. This means that the total number of citations is divided by the number of institutions contributing to a publication. Previously, the method used in THE rankings was to assign the total citations of a paper to all of the institutions that contributed just as though each one had been the only contributor. This has produced some very questionable results with universities that were excellent but very specialised or just generally unproductive  scoring remarkably high scores for citations. Panjab university, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa, Federico Santa Maria Technical University and Moscow State Engineering Physics Institute have all had moments of glory in the THE rankings because of  citation scores that were dramatically higher than their scores for research or any other indicator or group of indicators.

The new method, if applied generally, is likely to see a significant reduction in the scores given to such universities. We can estimate what might happen by looking at the four universities that are included in both the African pilot ranking and last year's world rankings,  Cape Town, Witwatersrand, Stellenbosch and Universite Marrakesh Cadi Ayyad, Morocco.

In the world rankings these universities received scores of 86.6, 67.3, 45.6 and 83 respectively. The score of 83 for Universite Cadi Ayyad resulted very largely from its contributions to several publications from the Large Hadron Collider project, one of which has been cited over 2,000 times, a low overall output of papers and the "regional modification" that gave a big boost to low scoring countries. The scores for the three South African universities reflected a larger total output and citations over a broad range of disciplines.

In the African pilot ranking the scores for citations were Cape Town 90.90, Witwatersrand 99.76, Stellenbosch 95.48 and Cadi Ayyad 78.61. The high scores for the South African institutions reflect a much lower mean score than in the world rankings. 

The fall in Cadi Ayyad's citation score from 3.6 points below Cape Town to 21.3 below and its falling behind Stellenbosch and Witwatersrand presumably reflect the impact of fractionalised counting.

This suggests that if fractionalised counting is used in the coming World University Rankings many small or specialised institutions will suffer and there will be a lot of reshuffling. 

The Top University in Africa is ...

... the University of Cape Town. What a surprise!

Times Higher Education (THE) has produced another "snapshot" ranking. This one is a list of 15 African universities ranked according to "research influence", that is the number of citations per paper normalised by field and year. It seems that a larger list will be published at a THE summit at the university of Johannesburg scheduled for the end of this month. Then, apparently, there will be discussions about full rankings with a broad range of indicators.

This is a smart move. Apart from diluting the impact of the QS BRICS rankings, this table puts the summit host in the top ten and gets attention from around the continent with three places in the north, two in the west and two in the east in the top fifteen.

Here is the top 15:

1.   University of Cape Town, South Africa
2.   University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
3.   Makerere University, Uganda
4.   Stellenbosch University, South Africa
5.   University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa
6.   University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria
7.   University of the Western Cape, South Africa
8.   University of Nairobi, Kenya
9.    University of Johannesburg, South Africa
10.  Universite Cadi Ayyad, Morrocco
11.  University of Pretoria, South Africa
12.  University of Ghana
13.  University of South Africa
14.  Suez Canal University, Egypt
15.  Universite Hassan II, Morrocco.

This is, of course, just one indicator but even so there will be a few academic eyebrows rising around the continent. Makerere has a good national and regional reputation but does it have more research influence than all but two South African universities?

How come Suez Canal University is there but not Cairo University or the American University in Cairo? And I am sure that in Nigeria there will be a lot of smirking around Ahmadu Bello and Ibadan Universities about Port Harcourt in sixth place.

One very good thing about this "experimental and preliminary ranking" is that THE and data provider Scopus are now using fractionalised counting of citations, so that if 100 universities contribute to a publication they each get credit for one hundredth of the citations.

That has not stopped Makerere and Port Harcourt from getting a boost, perhaps too much of a boost, for taking part in a huge multinational medical study but it has reduced the distortions that this indicator can cause.

So, for once, well done THE!... Now, what about taking a look at secondary affiliations?

Is this really happening?

If this continues France will be the least intelligent country in the world in a century.

Drawing straight lines on graphs and getting excited about tiny samples can be dangerous. Even so, this is a little frightening.

James Thompson's blog notes a study by Edward Dutton and Richard Lynn that suggests that the French national average IQ declined by nearly 4 points in a decade. The sample size was only 79 so we should not start panicking too much until there are a few more studies. It will be interesting to see if this one is replicated.