The Decline of American Research

Looking through the  data of the latest SCImago Journal and Country Rank is a sobering experience. If you just look at the data for the quarter century from 1996 to 2020 then there is nothing very surprising. But an examination of the data year by year shows a clear and  frightening picture of scientific decline in the United States.

Over the whole of the quarter century the United States has produced 11,986,435 citable documents, followed by China with 7,229,532, and the UK with 3,347,117.

Quantity, of course, is not everything when comparing research capability. We also need to look at quality. SJCR also supplies data on citations which are admittedly an imperfect assessment of quality: they can be easily gamed with self-citations, mutual citations, and so on. They often measure what is fashionable, not that which contributes to public welfare or advances in fundamental science. They are at the moment, however, if collected and analysed carefully and competently, perhaps the least unreliable and subjective metric available for describing the quality of research.

Looking at the number of citations per paper, we have to set  a threshold otherwise the top country for quality would be Anguilla, followed by the Federated States of Micronesia, and Tokelau. So we wrote in a 50,000 paper threshold over the 25 years.

Top place for citations   in 1996-2020 goes to Switzerland, followed by the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden, with the USA in fifth place and the UK in tenth. Apart from the US it looks like the leaders in research are Cold Europe, the countries around the North and Baltic seas plus Switzerland.

China is well down the list in 51st place.

Things look very different when we look at the data year by year. In 1996 the USA was well ahead of everybody for  the output of citable documents with 350,258 documents, followed by Japan with 89,430. Then came the UK, Germany, France, Russia. China is a long way behind in nineth place with 30,856 documents.

Fast forward to 2020. Looking at output, China has now overtaken the US for citable documents and India has overtaken Germany and Japan. That is something that has been anticipated for quite some time.

That's quantity. Bear in mind that China and India have bigger populations than the USA so the output per capita is a lot less. For the moment.

Looking at citations per paper published in 1996 the United states had 42.14 citations or 1.62 per year over the quarter century. By 2020 this had shrunk to 1.22 per year.

It is possible that the annual score will pick up in later years as the US recovers from the lockdown and the virus before its competitors. It is equally possible that those papers may get fewer citations as time passes.

But Switzerland, which  was slightly ahead of the US in 1996, is in 2020 well in front, having improved its annual count of citations per paper from 1.65 to 1.68. Then there a cluster of other countries that have overtaken the US -- Australia, the  Netherlands, the UK.

And now China has also overtaken the US for quality with 1.23 citations per paper per year.

It looks as though the current pandemic will just accelerate what was happening anyway. Unless something drastic happens we can look forward to China steadily attaining and maintaining hegemony over the natural sciences.

Energetic and Proactive Leadership or a Defective Indicator?

It is now normal for university administrators to use global rankings to market their institutions, reward themselves and, all too often, justify demands for more public funding. Unfortunately, some ranking agencies are more than happy to go along with this.

One example of the misuse of rankings is from July of last year  when the Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, Sir Hilary Beckles, proclaimed a triple first  in the 2020 Times Higher Education (THE) rankings.

The original  target was to be be in the top 3% of ranked universities by the end of the current strategic planning cycle. The Vice-Chancellor was very happy that as a result of  the work of "an energetic and proactive leadership team of campus principals and others" the university was in the top 1% of the THE Latin America and Caribbean rankings and the top 1% of golden age universities, and was the only ranked university in the Caribbean.

Another article has just appeared lauding the achievements of the university. The Vice-Chancellor has asserted that "(t)he Times Higher Education informed us that what we have achieved is quite spectacular. That many universities had taken 30 years to achieve what we have achieved in a mere three years."

If this is an accurate report of what THE said then the magazine is being very irresponsible. Universities are complex structures, and cannot be turned around with just a few million dollars or a few dozen highly cited researchers. Without drastic restructuring or amalgamation, such a remarkable change is almost invariably the result of methodological changes or methodological defects. The latter is the case here.

UWI 's performance might appear  quite impressive but it seems that we have another case of  THE seeing things that nobody else can. THE is not the only global university ranking. In fact, it is in some important respects not a good one. Let's take a look at some other rankings. UWI is not ranked in Leiden Ranking, the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities, the US News Best Global Universities, or the QS World University Rankings.

It does make an appearance in University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP) published by Middle East Technical University where it is ranked 1622th and it is 1938th in the Center for World University Rankings.

But in the THE World University Rankings the university is in the top 600 and it is 18th in Latin America and the Caribbean. This is because of a single defective indicator.

UWI has an apparently healthy 81.1 in the THE world rankings citations indicator, supposedly a measure of research influence or impact, which at first sight seems odd since it has a very low score, 10.4, for research. In the Latin American rankings, where competition is less severe, that becomes  93.6 for citations and 75.8 for research. How could a university do so brilliantly for research influence when it has a poor reputation for research, doesn't publish many papers, and has little research income?

What has happened is that UWI has benefitted from THE's peculiar citations indicator that does not use fractional counting for papers with less than a hundred authors, plus hyper-normalisation, plus a country bonus for being located in a low performing country, resulting in a few multi-author, multi-cited papers pushing universities into positions that they could never achieve anywhere else.

UWI has recently contributed to a few papers with a large number of contributors and many citations in genetics and medicine in top journals including Lancet, Science, Nature, and the International Journal of Surgery. Five of these papers are linked with the Global Burden of Disease Study.

UWI is  to be congratulated for having a number of affiliated scientists who are taking part in cutting edge projects. Nonetheless, it is true that these have an impact only because of the technical defects of the THE rankings. In the last few years a succession of unlikely places -- Anglia Ruskin, Peradeniya, Reykjavik, Aswan, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Durban University of Technology, have risen to the top of the citations charts in the THE rankings.

They have done so nowhere else. The exalted status of UWI in the THE WUR and its various offshoots is due to an eccentric methodology. If THE reforms that methodology, something that they have been talking about for a long time, or abandons the world rankings, the university will once again be consigned to the outer darkness of the unranked.

The sensational fall of Panjab University and the sensational coming rise*

*If present methodology continues

The Hindustan Times has a report on the fall of Panjab University (PU) in the latest THE Emerging Economies Rankings. PU has fallen from 150th in 2019 to 201-250 this year. As expected, rivals and the media have launched a chorus of jeers against the maladministration of a once thriving institution.

But that isn't half of it. In 2014, the first year of these rankings, PU was ranked 14th in the emerging world and first in India ahead even of the highly regarded IITs. Since then the decline has been unrelenting. PU was 39th in 2015, 130th in 2018, 166th in 2020.

Since 2014 PU's scores for Research, Teaching and Industry Income have risen. That for International Outlook has fallen but that did not have much of an effect since it accounts for only 10 per cent of the total weighting.

What really hurt PU was the Citations indicator. In 2014 PU received a score of 84.7 for citations largely because of its participation in the mega-papers radiating from the Large Hadron Collider project, which have thousands of contributors and thousands of citations. But then THE stopped counting such papers and consequently in 2016 PU's citation score fell to 41 and its overall place to 121st. It has been downhill nearly every year since then.

The Director of PU's Internal Quality Assurance Cell said that the university has improved for research and teaching but needed to do better for international visibility and that proactive steps had been taken. The former Vice-Chancellor said that other universities were improving but PU was stagnating and was not even trying to overcome its weaknesses.

In fact, PU's decline had  nothing or very little  to do with international visibility or the policy failures of the administration just as its remarkable success in 2014 had nothing to do with working as a team, the strength brought by diversity, dynamic transformational leadership, or anything else plucked from the bureaucrats' big bag of clichés.

PU bet the farm on citations of particle physics mega-papers and for a couple of years that worked well. But then THE changed the rules of the game and stopped counting them, although after another year they received a reduced amount of credit. PU, along with the  Middle East Technical University and some other Turkish, Korean and French institutions that had overinvested in the CERN projects, tumbled down the THE rankings.

But PU may be about to make a comeback. Readers of this blog will probably guess what is coming next.

When THE stopped favouring papers with thousands of contributors they abolished the physics privilege that elevated places like Tokyo Metropolitan University, Federico Santa Maria Technical University, and Colorado School of Mines to the top of the research impact charts and replaced it with medical research privilege .

In 2018 PU started to publish papers that were part of the Gates-backed Global Burden of Disease Study (GBDS). Those papers have hundreds, but not thousands, of authors and so they are able to slip through the mega paper filter. The GBDS has helped Anglia Ruskin University, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Aswan University, and Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences rise to the top of the research impact metric.

So far there have not been enough citations to make a difference for PU. But as those citations start to accumulate, providing of course that their impact is not diluted by too many other publications, PU will begin to rise again.

Assuming of course that THE's Methodology does not change.

An Indisputable Ranking Scorecard? Not Really.

The University of New South Wales (UNSW) has produced an aggregate ranking of global universities, known as ARTU. This is based on the "Big Three" rankers, QS, Times Higher Education (THE) and the Shanghai ARWU. The scores that are given are not an average but a aggregate of their ranks, which is then inverted. Nor surprisingly, Australian universities do well and the University of Melbourne is the best in Australia.

Nicholas Fisk, Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research, hopes that this ranking will become "the international scoreboard, like the ATP tennis rankings" and "the indisputable scoreboard for where people fit in on the academic rankings."

This is not a new idea. I had a go at producing an aggregate ranking a few years ago, called Global Ranking of Academic Performance or GRAPE. It was going to be the Comparative Ranking of Academic Performance: maybe I was right the first time.  It was justifiably criticised by Ben Sowter of QS. I think though that it was quite right to note that some of the rankings of the time underrated the top Japanese universities and overrated British and Australian schools.

The ARTU is an another example of the emergence of a cartel or near cartel of the three global rankings that are apparently considered the only ones worthy of attention by academic administrators and the official media.

There are in fact a lot more and these three are not even the best three rankings, far from it. A pilot study, Rating the Rankers,  conducted by the International Network of Research Management Systems (INORMS), has found that on four significant dimensions, transparency, governance, measuring what matters, and rigour, the performance of six well known rankings is variable and that of the big three is generally unimpressive. That of THE is especially deficient.

Seriously, should  we consider as indisputable a ranking that includes indicators that proclaim Anglia Ruskin University as a world leader for research impact and Anadolu University as tops for innovation, another that counts that long dead winners of Nobel and Fields awards, and another that gives disproportionate weight to a survey with more respondents from Australia than from China?

There does seem to be a new mood of ranking skepticism emerging in many parts of the international research community. Rating the Rankers has been announced in an article in Nature. The critical analysis of rankings will, I hope, do more to create fair and valid systems of comparative assessment than simply adding up a bunch of flawed and opaque indicators.