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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

The Shanghai Rankings: More Interesting This Year

The Shanghai rankings are usually the most stable and therefore the least interesting (for journalists, politicians and bureaucrat) of the current array.

This year, however, they are quite volatile. The reason for that is that the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy has completed the transition from the old to the new lists of highly cited researchers supplied by Thomson Reuters. In 2014 and 2015 they used both lists with an equal weighting which has reduced the abruptness of the transition. In addition, the rankings now count only primary affiliations. As a result there have been enough ascents and descents to gladden the hearts of higher education journalists and experts.

It should be noted that the effect of this is largely to accelerate trends that were in progress anyway. The old list was clearly out of date and it was time for a new one.

First, to my predictions. Harvard is still number one. Wisconsin at Madison, Rutgers and Virginia Polytechnic Institute have all fallen. Aalborg, Nanyang Technological University, Peking, Chiba and Tsinghua have risen. Peking and Tsinghua are now in the top 100 and heading for the top 50.

But the University of Tehran has not risen. It has fallen by 84 places, presumably because it lost a highly cited researcher during the second half of 2015.

Overall, the rankings provide more evidence for the rise of China with two universities in the top 100 and 54 in the top 500 compared with none and 44 last year, but not the rest of Asia. South Korea has gone from 12 in the top 500 to 11, Japan from 18 to 16 and Israel 6 to 5. India still has only one representative in the top 500 and Malaysia two.

Meanwhile the USA  now has 137 universities in the top 500 compared with 146  last year

Rapidly rising institutions include Toulouse School of Economics, from 375th to 265th, largely because of being given a free pass this year for papers in Nature and Science, University of the Witwatersrand from 244th to 204th, University of Queensland from 77th to 55th and , King Abdullah University of Science and technology from 352nd to 254th.

Kwazulu-Natal has fallen from 413th to 494th, Dartmouth College from 215th to 271st and Universiti Malaya from 353rd to 413th.

My Predictions for the Shanghai Rankings

Watch this Nate Silver.

In the latest edition of the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) to be announced on Monday, the first place will go to Harvard.

The methodology for this prediction is based on an extremely complex and sophisticated algorithm that incorporates a large number of variables and will remain a secret for the moment.

Now for some easier predictions.

The Shanghai rankings are generally famous for their stability and consistency which makes them rather boring for journalists and naive administrators. No shocking headlines about catastrophic plunges in the rankings after the latest vandalism by government Scrooges.

But the Shanghai rankers have had problems with their highly cited researchers indicator. Thomson Reuters have stopped adding to their old list of highly cited researchers and have published a new one. The Shanghai Ranking Consultancy combined the two lists in 2014 and 2015 and have said that this year only the new list will be used in calculating the overall score.

Last year Shanghai published a list of scores for the highly cited indicator in 2013 (the old list), combined scores in 2015 and scores if the new list alone had been used.

Here are the universities that will rise or fall by ten points (two points in the weighted overall rankings) as the new list replaces the combined lists. This assumes that universities have not recruited or lost highly cited researchers dring 2015. If they have then the predictions will be incorrect. Also, changes in the highly cited indicator may be balanced by changes in other indicators

Predicted to Fall
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Rutgers: State University of New Jersey
Virginia Polytechnic Institute

Predicted to Rise
Aalborg University
Nanyang Technological University
Peking University
Chiba University
Tsinghua University
University of Tehran