Times Higher Education (THE) has announced the latest edition of its reputation ranking. The scores for this ranking will be included in the forthcoming World University Ranking and THE's other tables, where they will have a significant or very significant effect. In the Japan University Ranking, they will get an 8% weighting, and in the Arab University Ranking, 41%. Why THE gives such a large weight to reputation in the Arab rankings seems a bit puzzling.
The ranking is based on a survey of researchers "who have published in academic journals, have been cited by other researchers and who have been published within the last five years," presumably in journals indexed in Scopus.
Until 2022 the survey was run by Elsevier but since then has been brought in-house.
The top of the survey tells us little new. Harvard is first and is followed by the rest of the six big global brands: MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and Berkeley. Leading Chinese universities are edging closer to the top ten.
For most countries or regions, the rank order is uncontroversial: Melbourne is the most prestigious university in Australia, Toronto in Canada, Technical University of Munich in Germany, and a greyed-out Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia. However, there is one region where the results are a little eyebrow-raising.
As THE has been keen to point out, there has been a remarkable improvement in the scores for some universities in the Arab region. This in itself is not surprising. Arab nations in recent years have invested massive amounts of money in education and research, recruited international researchers, and begun to rise in the research-based rankings such as Shanghai and Leiden. It is to be expected that some of these universities should start to do well in reputation surveys.
What is surprising is which Arab universities have now appeared in the THE reputation ranking. Cairo University, the American University in Beirut, Qatar University, United Emirates University, KAUST, and King Abdulaziz University have achieved some success in various rankings, but they do not make the top 200 here.
Instead, we have nine universities: the American University in the Middle East, Prince Mohammed Bin Fahd University, Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud Islamic University, Qassim University, Abu Dhabi University, Zayed University, Al Ain University, Lebanese University, and Beirut Arab University. These are all excellent and well-funded institutions by any standards, but it is hard to see why they should be considered to be among the world's top 200 research-orientated universities.
None of these universities makes it into the top 1,000 of the Webometrics ranking or the RUR reputation rankings. A few are found in the US News Best Global Universities, but none get anywhere near the top 200 for world or regional reputation. They do appear in the QS world rankings but always with a low score for the academic survey.
THE accepts that survey support for the universities comes disproportionately from within the region in marked contrast to US institutions and claim that Arab universities have established a regional reputation but have yet to sell themselves to the rest of the world.
That may be so, but again, there are several Arab universities that have established international reputations. Cairo University is in the top 200 in the QS academic survey, and the RUR reputation ranking, and the American University of Beirut is ranked 42nd for regional research reputation by USN. They are, however, absent from the THE reputation ranking.
When a ranking produces results that are at odds with other rankings and with accessible bibliometric data, then a bit of explanation is needed.
