FAQs at QS

QS have answered some questions over at QS TOPUNIVERSITIES. Here are some of the questions and ATFAQS (Answers to ...) or extracts and some comments.


"1) How do you plan to address the perceived bias towards English-speaking (and particularly UK) universities?

...The reality is, however, that in many areas of university competitiveness, operating in English is an advantage. English language journals are more widely read and cited, the top four destinations for international students (and I suspect also faculty) are the US, Canada, UK and Australia – all English speaking. Many universities in non-English speaking Asia, recognising this are operating more programs in English and all global rankings currently carry this bias, not just ours. Our objective is to minimise the bias, but it is far from clear whether eliminating it entirely would be appropriate."

Fair enough. But the bias within the English speaking world (the high scores for Oxbridge, the London schools and colleges, Edinburgh and Australian universities compared to the US and Canada) in the THE-QS rankings was probably more significant.

"3) Following the launch of the government-funded Assessment of Higher Education Learning Objectives (AHELO) pilot scheme, how do you respond to the suggestion that an insufficient emphasis is given to teaching standards and student skills within the more research-oriented established methodologies?


QS absolutely concurs that teaching and learning is inadequately embraced in any of the existing global rankings, including our own and is watching the AHELO exercise with great interest to see if lessons can be drawn and applied to the much broader geographical scope of our rankings. QS is also assessing whether student and alumni inputs can help draw a clearer picture of comparative performance in teaching and learning. On the student skills side of things, QS is currently the only global ranking taking this aspect seriously – via the Employer Review indicator."

Assessing the quality of teaching has so many pitfalls that it may never be possible to do it objectively on an international scale. A global version of RateMyProfessor might be feasible but there is obvious potential for rigging. It also has to be said that for more proficient students -- and that would include many or most of those in universities that will be in the top 200 0r 300 in any sort of ranking -- teaching is largely irrelevant. I doubt if any high fliers from the Ivy League or the grandes ecoles were ever quizzed by interviewers about the staff-student ratio in their classes or whether their instructors explained desired learning outcomes or whether they felt safe in their lecture halls. If teaching is to be assessed an opinion survey is probably no worse than anything else that might be proposed.

"4) Do you think that the low ranking of LSE in the 2009 rankings (67th) is reflective of an inherent bias toward scientific subjects within citations-based methodologies, and if so how do you plan to address this in 2010?

The QS World University Rankings™ are designed to assess the all-round quality of universities across all disciplines and levels, in teaching, research, employability and internationalisation. LSE is a fantastic institution, as is reflected by their persistent high position in the Social Sciences – the faculty area in which they are focused. In fact, it is so strong with its narrower focus that it manages to compete with world leading institutions with a much broader range. Even if we only take the proportion of world universities recognised by UNESCO a Top 100 placing represents the top 1% - a prolific achievement for an institution that focuses on only a small part of the academic spectrum. To put things in perspective, LSE fails to break the top 200 in the Shanghai Ranking."

It seems that the position of LSE in the forthcoming rankings will be closely watched. Yes, there has been a bias against institutions with strengths in the social sciences and this may be corrected in the THE rankings but anything that benefits LSE will also benefit general universities as much or more.

"5) How can the shift in position of some universities in the THE -QS World University Rankings 2004-2009 be explained?"

QS essentially answers this questions, or rather avoids answering it, by pointing out that later editions of the THE-QS rankings showed more stability and that national rankings of British universities were even more volatile.

One reason why the THE-QS rankings were so unstable is simply the large number of errors that were made. These include counting ethnic minorities in Malaysia as international faculty and students, giving 1 out of 100 for citations to Washington University in St. Louis, the Indian Institutes of technology and Technion Israel and then boosting their scores in the following year, overcounting the number of faculty at Duke University and overcounting the number of citations or undercounting the number of faculty at the University of Alabama.

Such errors do, however, appear to have been eliminated from the most recent rankings.

Another problem arose from the the frequent changes in methods and sources of data. Here there is a real and serious dilemma . Methodological improvements are necessary to maintain validity but at the same time they can undermine credibility by causing noticeable fluctuations.

One solution to this might simply be to publish two sets of rankings every year, one with an unchanged methodology called the QS Classic or the Shanghai Classic ranking and another incorporating the latest methodological changes called the New, Alpha.. Mega.. or whatever ranking.

Job Advertisement

QS are recruiting a Research Assistant for their London office, presumably to work on the data collection for the 2010 rankings.

"You will have analytical insight and familiarity with working with large data sets as well as you will be an effective communicator both personally and in writing. You will be results-oriented and dedicated to contributing to the success and development of our business unit and its research outputs. Responsibilities include Data collection gathering correct information from universities directly via email website telephone or third party sources Data entry accurate data entry into existing online database Correspondence dealing with university representatives or third party clients handling enquiries promoting the products Research research the web or other applicable sources for useful information Research Outputs contributing to high quality and insightful research outputs Gathering the correct information from universities can be a challenging task and often requires a surprising level of skill tenacity and diplomacy as well as a healthy appetite for problem solving. Therefore Skills attributes required Ability to stay focused and high attention to detail -Tenacity diplomacy and reliability Healthy appetite for problem solving Inquisitive mind and genuine interest Good communication Effective time management Commitment and Enthusiasm Excellent knowledge and experience of office software applications Additional languages desirable. "

It sounds like they are getting serious. The additional languages might be significant. But this bit at the end is surprising.


"This is a full time position requiring a minimum of 35 hours per week and a maximum of 40."

A maximum work week of 40 hours! I wonder if there are any universities anywhere in the world who have that. And I bet they don't in Shanghai.

Article on Rankings

There is a detailed and thorough review of recent developments by David Jobbins in University World News:

First shots fired in ranking war

Ranking News

There has been a lot news from the rankosphere over the last week.

On the 8th of March QS World University Rankings announced that they were launching their 2010 Research.


"largest review of international universities ever conducted

* Over 2000 participating universities from more than 130 countries

* Over 200,000 university selections by academics, for excellence in research quality*

* 5000 participating employers"

If the response is similar to last year when the average academic reviewer listed 12 universities, then 200,000 university selections would mean about 17,000 respondents, quite a big jump. Two thousand participating universities would mean more than doubling the number of universities assessed, a very good idea in principle, although there could be logistical problems and, of course, the chances of embarassing errors will increase.

Meanwhile, QS have started a new newsletter QS Rankings & Global Higher Education Trends and also started a question and answer page.

On the 11th of March, Times Higher Education announced:


"The biggest and most ambitious project to measure universities' academic reputation for the Times Higher Education World University Rankings was launched this week.

Thomson Reuters, the exclusive data supplier and analyst for the THE rankings in 2010 and beyond, unveiled its Academic Reputation Survey in Philadelphia on 11 March.

Over the coming weeks, thousands of academics around the world, who have been carefully selected as being statistically representative of the global academic workforce, will be asked to complete a short, invitation-only survey to state which in their opinion are the strongest universities in their fields of expertise.

In a major new development, the survey will gather opinions on the standards of both research and teaching, raising the prospect of the first worldwide reputation-based measure of teaching quality in higher education. "

It sounds like THE are going to draw much of their survey sample from the database of Thomson Reuters. In other words they will survey only or mainly published researchers, which is highly appropriate if research quality is the only thing that is being assessed. Now that THE are going to ask about teaching quality, it might be worth thinking about also surveying teaching-only university staff and undergraduate and postgraduate students.

So we are going to have the largest review ever conducted versus the biggest and most ambitious project. Whatever happened to that British gift for understatement?

Comparing Two Surveys

Over the last few years university rankings have acquired a large audience. Each year since 2003 , when the first Shanghai index came out, the ups and downs of universities, especially in East and Southeast Asia, have commanded almost as much attention as the fortunes of national football teams.

This year it seems that competition between the rankers, Times Higher Education and their former partners, QS, will be get as much attention as that between universities and a lot of that attention will go to the merits or flaws of the surveys that are now under way.

Times Higher have just announced the launching of the new reputational survey while QS have started a sign -up facility. If THE are going to start the survey now then they could create a problem for QS since after one e-mail message plus a few follow-ups (I expect Ipsos MORI will tell them about this) and, for some people, a form from the EU rankings, severe ranking fatigue will set in and the later survey forms will go unanswered.

Here are some points of comparison of the two main surveys that will be filling academic e-mail boxes in the next few weeks or months.


Indicator Weighting

QS have stated that their survey will continue to have a weighting of 40 percent. Times Higher say that theirs will have a smaller weighting but have not said exactly how small. Probably the reduction will not be too great if the expense and effort of conducting a survey is to be justified.

Participants

The bulk of QS's survey respondents have come from the mailing lists of World Scientific, a Singapore based publishing company that is linked with Imperial College London and has had a close relationship with Peking University. Others, mainly in the humanities and social sciences, have come from Mardev, a company that collects academic addresses. Some no doubt have been identified during QS's various seminars and tours. This year QS have added a sign up facility that will screen those who wish to take part.

THE will get most of their respondents from the Thomson Reuters internal database by which they presumably mean authors of papers in ISI-indexed journals and conference proceedings, supplemented by so far unidentified third party sources.

The basic qualification then for participating in the QS survey is therefore to subscribe to a newsletter from World Scientific. For the THE survey it will be to to have published a paper in a reputable academic journal or conference proceedings. The THE respondents should then be better qualified to comment on research quality, although one might note that the assigning of the role of first or corresponding author is sometimes a political decision rather than a recognition of actual contributions to a research project.

Numbers

THE have said that they are aiming at a target of 25,000 participants. QS appear to be aiming at close to 17,000 this year.

Regional and Disciplinary Balance

QS have stated that they weight by discipline and subject when selecting potential respondents from the World Scientific and Mardev databases. After data collection they balance responses between three super- egions, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, and Africa, Europe and the Middle east, but not apparently within those regions. THE have stated they will distribute the survey forms to reflect the world distribution of academic researchers geographically and in terms of discipline.

Questions

THE have stated that they will be asking questions about teaching and research and that the questions about research will be more focused than in the past. QS will continue to ask only about research, which is a little odd since their respondents probably include many who teach but do not do research.

Languages

Last year the THE- QS forms could be answered in English or Spanish. QS may be including other language options this year. So far, it looks as though the THE forms will be entirely in English.

General

It appears that THE may produce a valid survey of the opinion of recently published researchers that reflects the current global distribution of academic research activity. The main problem may well be that there will be a serious conflict between quantity and quality. Academic e-mail addresses are highly degradable and THE may find that many of their published researchers have retired, been downsized, moved, died, forgotten their password or just got fed up with filling out online survey forms. If, in pursuit of the targeted 25,000, they are forced to start trying to contact scientists who published an article (or just put their names on the work of graduate students) several years ago the validity of the survey may become questionable.


On the other hand, it would seem an error for QS to insist on continuing to ask only about research. The THE-QS survey was a dubious measure of research performance but it might have more credibility if it also measured teaching quality or social and economic contributions.

On balance, it would seem that THE, if it can get the the number of respondents it needs, will produce a more accurate and credible survey of opinion about research, although QS might claim that by reaching out to university teachers and non-English speakers they are providing a platform for those whose views ought to be considered in any opinion survey.

Hyper-bureaucracy

Times Higher has a leader by Ann Mroz on the rising tide of academic bureaucracy, to which, we might add, rankings, ratings and assessment have made no small contribution.

"But banal and mind-numbing though it is, bureaucracy isn't neutral. It is insidious, changing the nature of both teaching and research; it also, of course, has been used to push academics in uncomfortable directions.

A scary new word to emerge in our cover story is "hyper-bureaucracy", which describes "an out-of-control system" that emerges in the search for optimum efficiency and takes no account of the costs in time, energy and money that are needed to achieve it. It is a bureaucratic nightmare in which there is no end to the extra information that can be acquired. The monitoring of contact hours and how academics spend their time are examples of the type of bureaucracy that "eats up people and resources", according to Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at the University of Warwick. "

Comment from Tines Higher

Phil Baty in today's Times Higher Education explains why the rankings need an overhaul despite their growing influence.

"So if the rankings have become an accepted reference point, why are we making such dramatic changes, switching our data provider and revamping our methodology? We are doing so precisely because the rankings have become such a respected reference point. If they are starting to influence strategic thinking and even government policy, we have a responsibility to make them as rigorous as possible."

Article on Rankings in Nature

A substantial article on developments in international university rankings by Declan Butler has appeared here.

Some extracts:

"Several approaches to university rankings now being developed are switching the emphasis away from crude league tables and towards more nuanced assessments that could provide better guidance for policy-makers, funding bodies, researchers and students alike. They promise to rank universities on a much wider range of criteria, and assess more intangible qualities, such as educational excellence. And the THE ranking list is trying to remake itself in the face of the criticism."

On the new Times Higher Education rankings

"Thomson Reuters plans to continue reputational surveys, but aims to have at least 25,000 reviewers, compared with the 4,000 used by QS for the THE 2009 rankings. It has partnered with UK pollster Ipsos MORI to try to ensure the survey is representative. "We are not doing this randomly, but putting a lot of thought behind it," says Simon Pratt, project manager for institutional research at Thomson Reuters. "We want a more balanced view across all subject areas." The THE will continue to rank all universities in the form of a league table, which critics say offers a false precision that exaggerates differences between institutions. But the new rankings will be more nuanced and detailed, according to Pratt, including data that enable institutions to compare themselves on various indicators with peers having similar institutional profiles."

On the European Union rankings

"U-Multirank also hopes to overcome one of the major criticisms of many existing ranking systems: that they focus excessively on research output, neglecting the many other crucial roles that universities have, not least teaching. Indeed, the Academic Ranking of World Universities, compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and generally known as the Shanghai index, focuses exclusively on research output and citation impact, including variables such as numbers of Nobel prizewinners and publications in Nature and Science(see 'Top marks')."

On the QS rankings

"QS intends to continue developing its university ranking despite losing its link to the THE. "We will continue improving the methodology and response levels to the surveys," says Sowter, adding that he welcomes the new competition. Other experts say that having more rankings will be beneficial, as it will reduce the undue influence of any one ranking."

I would like to add one point. I have been as critical of QS as anyone but it is rather unfair to talk about 4,000+ respondents to their academic survey. They had 4,000 new respondents last year, making a total of 9,000+.

How Much Instability?

Phil Baty in Times Higher Education writes about fluctuations in the old THE-QS rankings

"Magazines that compile league tables have an interest in instability - playing around with their methodologies to ensure rankings remain newsworthy.

This was the argument made by Alice Gast, president of Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, at the Lord Dearing memorial conference at the University of Nottingham this month.

She has a point. Dramatic movements in the league tables make the news and generate interest - helpful for the circulation figures.

But too much movement raises questions about credibility: everyone knows that it takes more than 12 months for an 800-year-old university to lose its status, or for a young pretender to ascend the heights. "

The THE-QS rankings were famous for their yearly fluctuations. This of course helped to make them much more popular than the reliable but boring Shanghai rankings (unless you were prepared to spend a few hours cutting and pasting the indicator scores of universities in the 300s and 400s into an Excel file and then they could be interesting). The rises and falls resulted from changes in methodology, errors, correction of errors and inconsistent application of guidelines.

Still, there are cases when universities undergo serious restructuring or pour massive funds into research or recruit administrators of the highest calibre and these developments should be reflected in any valid index. Rankings that do not show some upward movement by, say, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology or King Abdullah University of Science and Technology ought to be considered suspect

Equally, it is striking that the major rankings contain elements, the THE-QS academic opinion survey, the Nobel laureates in the Shanghai rankings, even eleven year old publications and citations in the Taiwan rankings, that disguise the steady relative decline of Oxford and Cambridge over the last two decades.

We shall have to wait until 2011 to see if the new THE ranking will avoid the suspicious fluctuations of the THE-QS rankings and also be sensitive to genuine changes in international higher education.

RateMyProfessors and Amy Bishop

Richard Vedder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity produces an interesting US ranking based on value for money for students. One key element is data provided from the famous or notorious site, RateMyProfessors. I used to think that it would a step forward in international university rankings to try to do something like this on a global scale. Now I am not so sure.

I assume that everbody has heard of the tragic shooting at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. My first suspicion was that the alleged murderer, Amy Bishop, was a talented but socially awkward academic who had snapped after being denied tenure on flimsy grounds of collegiality or for being politically incorrect.

That does not look like being the case. A blog, Shepherds and Black Sheep has analysed her research output and found that it seems inflated, with one article having her children as c0-authors and another published in an "online vanity press' and several more being co-authored with her husband

Bishop's pages at RateMyProfessors are also interesting. At first sight they look quite impressive with a total score of 3.6 out of 5, fifth best in her faculty, and 3.4 for clarity and 3.7 for helpfulness. But there are some oddities.

The user comments start with three excellent reviews, one on 26 May, 2009 and two on 19 May. A little odd. Back in June 2004 there were also two rave reviews again posted on the same day.

It is also noticeable that the good reviews tend to cluster together with three consecutve good reviews in January and February 2006 and another three, one after the other, in November, 2004 and January, 2005.

Another odd thing is that for the helpfulness and clarity indicators there is a very distinctive distribution curve. For helpfulness, Bishop had 6 ones (the worse), 2 twos , 5 threes, 3 fours, and then 17 fives (the best) For clarity, it was 7 ones, 5 twos, 4 threes, 3 fours and 15 fives. Note the dramatic jump from four to five in both categories.

Compare this with a low scoring teacher who gets 4 fours and 4 fives for helpfulness and 5 fours and 6 fives for clarity.

Compare also a high scoring faculty member with 13 fours and 25 fives for helpfulness and 15 fours and 28 fives for clarity. A big jump from four to five but proportionately much less than Bishop's.

Is it possible to rig RateMyProfessors?

According to Tenured Radical it is very easy.

"To test my theory that ratings could be posted by people who had never been my students, I went to the dreaded site, and registered myself, under my own name, as a Zenith student. Easy-peasy. The only false information I provided was a birth date that made me 19 years old (I wish!) and the box I checked that affirmed my status as a Zenith sophomore. I then successfully added a rating about myself. You can see it here: it's the anxious looking green emoticon that has the comment "interesting." I thought it only fair to add something right down the middle, neither good nor bad. Inflammatory perhaps, but arrogant never, that's my motto. "

So, I have a strong suspicion that someone had been going to RateMyProfessors and posting effusive commuents about Bishop (and nasty ones about other faculty members.?)

Perhaps RateMyProfessors is not such as good indicator after all.

A Survey from Thomson Reuters

A survey was conducted recently for Thomson Reuters to provide input for the forthcoming Times Higher Education World University Rankings. The results of the survey can be accessed at the Global Institutional Profiles Project set up by Thomson Reuters.

The results of the survey are important since they might provide a clue to what the new ranking will look like.

There were 350 respondents from the “global academic community” This is apparently more than the numbers that answered similar surveys by QS but it does not seem very large especially when THE has raised justified concern about the low and possibly unrepresentative numbers participating in the THE-QS survey of academic opinion.

Of those 350, 107 were from the UK (31%), 90 from the US, 30 from Australia, nine from Canada and seven from New Zealand. Thirty three were from the rest of Europe, 32 from Asia and 42 from the others, i.e. not from North America, Europe, Asia and Australasia. With nearly a third of the respondents coming from the UK and over two thirds from just five English speaking countries this is a distinctly Anglo-Saxon-centric affair.

The first question was the level of familiarity with various rankings. The THE ranking was the one with which the largest number of respondents were familiar. This is a slightly odd result since from 2004 to 2009 THE published rankings under the name THE (S) - QS World University Rankings. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings (minus QS) have yet to appear. No doubt, THE would claim that it was they who published the ranking and can retrospectively rename them if they wish.

Summarizing the responses to the survey, it seems that the respondents believe that university rankings
• are useful
• have methodological problems
• are biased
• encourage the manipulation of data
• encourage a focus on numerical comparisons
• use data that is not transparent or reproducible
• do not not include appropriate metrics
• favour research institutions

Among the information that respondents need or would like to have are

• Publications and citations
• Research awards
• Patents
• Faculty student ratio
• Faculty activity ratios (teaching income/research grants/publications per staff)
• Number of faculty by gender, international, ethnicity or race
• Number of graduate programs and degrees
• Collaboration
• Community engagement
• Perceptions of researchers, employers, alumni and community

Some of this, community engagement for instance, is too vague to be useful. Other items contradict the stated objectives of the developing ranking system: including patents and research collaboration in a general ranking would add more bias in favour of the natural and applied sciences. Others betray the American or European concerns of the respondents: alumni have little significance outside the USA. It is also noticeable that nobody seems interested in student perceptions.

Starting Again

This, in an article by Phil Baty of THE in The Australian, sounds promising.

"So we've started again. For 2010, Thomson Reuters has hired pollsters Ipsos MORI to carry out the reputation survey, and it has committed to obtaining 25,000 responses, from a carefully targeted and properly sampled group that will represent the true demographics of global higher education.

This may mean a slip in the performance of British and Australian institutions but if that is the case then so be it. We are interested in getting closer to the truth. "

Chinese University Rankings

Click here for a survey by Nick Clark in the World Education News and Reviews

Quality Assurance and Ranking of Higher Education in Asia-Pacific and Taiwan

Click here for another presentation from the CHEA International Seminar by Angela Yong-chi Hou of the Higher Education Evaluation and Accereditaion Council of Taiwan.

Presentation by Robert Morse

Click here for a comprehensive and informative presentation by Robert Morse of US News at the CHEA International Seminar in Washington DC on America's best Colleges Rankings: A Brief History.

Tales of Jiggery-Pokery

Phil Baty argues in yesterday's Times Higher Education that, despite the "jiggery-pokery" employed by some universities to get a better position in university rankings, "there is no need to sacrifice mission to position"

He refers to several cases of university administrators manipulating data to rise in the rankings. One example is Albion College in the USA who divided a small alumnus donation into smaller annual payments. Frankly, I wonder if this is worth getting worried about. Surely, a far greater scandal in American colleges is the admission, in order to please alumni and get money out of them, of large numbers of academically unqualified student athletes.

The article then discusses "the less dishonest but nevertheless deleterious effects of rankings, such as pressing staff to publish in English-language journals, which may lift an institution's profile but may not best serve its local community'

This is true but it should be noted that THE has shifted from using Scopus data to Thomson Reuters whose database has been criticised for its overwhlemingly English language content.

Baty is right on target when he comments on institutions' importing large numbers of foreign students in order to boost their score for the internationalistion score on the THE-QS rankings. There are though other reasons, mainly financial, for doing this. In the UK and Australia it is likely that in many cases this has contributed to a decline in quality.

Counting international students is rather different from counting international faculty. In most cases, students pay, or someone pays for them, to travel abroad to go to university but universities pay international faculty to come to them.

It would be a good idea if THE dropped the intenational student indicator. If they are going to keep it then one simple and helpful measure might be to include the showing of a passport in the definition of international. In other words treat the European Union, or at least the Schengen Area, as a single country.

How Good is LSE at Economics?

The answer is very good but there seem to be a few US universities that are better.

Tilburg University has just produced a new ranking of Economics schools based on publications (ISI indexed journals) in journals in Economics, Econometrics and Finance. Harvard is first with a score of 551 followed by Chicago (385). LSE is eighth alongside Northwestern University with a score of 280. Oxford is 22nd and University College London 29th. Tilburg is 23rd.

If LSE can only get to eighth place in Economics then what can we expect from an ojective ranking in the natural sciences and the arts and humanities?

Who's Interested in Ranking?

The country share of vistors to this blog is as follows. Noticeably absent are China and Russia unless they are in 'unkown' (12%).

United States 22%
United Kingdom 8%
Switzerland 7%
Canada 4%
Malaysia 4%
Singapore 4%
Germany 3%
Nigeria 3%
France 3%
Indonesia 2%
India 2%
Poland 2%
Spain 2%
Mexico 1%
Czech Republic 1%
Greece 1%
Brunei 1%
Belgium 1%
Australia 1%
Ireland 1%
Japan 1%

Comparing Ranking Sites

I recently came across a site called StrategicFIRST that ranks websites according to traffic and indicates an estimated value for the site. I am not sure how reliable it is but here are the data for some sites associated with international university ranking.

Estimated Value

Webometrics (webometrics.info) $97,281
QS Quacquarelli Symonds (topuniversities.com) $89,122
Scimargo (scimagojr.com) $86,528
Academic ranking of World Universities (aarwu.org) $79,545
Times Higher Education (timeshighereducation.co.uk) $79,132
HEEACT (heeact.edu.tw) $23,684
University Ranking Watch (rankingwatch.blogspot.com) $5,176
Global Universities Ranking [Russia]globaluniversitiesranking.org $3,941
Princeton Review (princetonreview.comcollege-rankings.aspx $3,802

The War of the THE-QS Succession

There is a comment by Nunzio Quacquarelli on the QS topuniversities rankings blog.

Here is an extract:

"In October 2009, QS and THE ended their collaboration under which THE was licensed to publish the QS results known as “Times Higher Education (THE) – QS World University Rankings”. Since then, THE have announced they intend to produce their own rankings and have been systematically critical of QS’ methodology as part of their explanation for the split. This is surprising; THE consistently praised the QS methodology throughout the six-year publishing collaboration. Indeed, their former publishing director described it as one of the best partnerships in the history of THE.

Similarly, Ann Mroz, Editor of THE wrote in October 2008: "These rankings use an unprecedented amount of data to deliver the most accurate measure available of the world’s best universities, and of the strength of different nations’ university systems. They are important for governments wanting to gauge the progress of their education systems, and are used in planning by universities across the world."

Phil Baty, Associate Editor of THE wrote only on October 10 2009: “Congratulations on a highly successful campaign on the rankings again this year. The internet is buzzing.” Yet it seems our objectives and methodological principles have subsequently diverged. QS will continue to produce our rankings using citation data from the Scopus database of Elsevier. THE have decided to align themselves with Thomson Reuters’ academic citation database."

New Webometrics Ranking

The new Webometrics ranking is out.

Some interesting points

The top 20 are all in the USA.

The best non-US university is Cambridge at 27.

British universities do not do very well. Oxford is at 37, University College London at 57 and Imperial at 157 while Webometrics joins the anti-LSE conspiracy by putting it at 234.

The top European universities seem to be in the North -- Edinburgh, Oslo, Helsinki. Something about the cold weather?

Regional Rankings

Best in Latin America: Sao Paulo
Best in Europe: Cambridge
Best in Central and Eastern Europe: Charles University
Best in Asia: Tokyo
Best in South East Asia: National University of Singapore
Best in South Asia: Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Best in the Arab World: King Saud University
Best in Oceania: Australian National University
Best in Africa: Cape Town

Finally Israeli universities should get a special award for mobility. They manage to be in Asia and Europe at the same time.

More Rising Stars



The rise of China to scientific superpower status has been well documented. See here for a report by Jonathon Adams, Christopher King and Nan Ma.


This can be confirmed by a simple search of the Scopus database which reveals 38,360 scientific publications from China in 1999 compared to 250,452 in 2009. For the United States the corresponding figures were 311,879 and 367,641.


The UK, France and Germany recorded modest increases over the decade while research output in Russia actually fell.

A certain amount of caution is in order. These figures refer to the quantity of research, not to its quality and China does have a large, although stable, population. Still, the West has cause to be concerned.


Some other countries have improved quite considerably over the decade. Korea, India, Australia and Hong Kong have doubled or nearly doubled and Thailand has more than tripled its research output.


It is especially noticeable that Malaysia is catching with Singapore. The former had 1,235 publications in 1999 and the latter 4,538 . In 2009 the figures were 7,834 and 10,993.


However, the prize f0r rapid growth goes to Iran which had 1,351 publications in 1999 and 19,088 in 2009. Compare this with Israel: 11,918 and 16,335.


If research in Iran goes on advancing at this rate and if other countries in the region also develop their scientific capabilities and if the ultra -orthodox extend their assault on reason and science into Israeli schools and universities, it looks as though Hamas and Hezbollah are going to the least of Israel's problems.

Who is Biased?

There has been a lot of discussion about university rankings recently. In Times Higher Education, Phil Baty refers to a comment in the satirical magazine Private Eye about the forthcoming European Union rankings. Why spend public money on the ranking of universities when there are already two recognised rankings? Perhaps, it has something to do with the striking absence of continental European universities from the upper reaches of the THE-QS and Shanghai rankings.

Baty claims to be less cynical than Private Eye. He says that:


"While I am sure CHERPA will strive to be fully independent, it is a group made up exclusively of European universities, and was set up in direct response to Europe's poor showing in the current rankings, so some suspicion is inevitable.

More serious, and entertaining, questions have been asked over other rankings. Russia's RatER raised eyebrows for putting Moscow State University in fifth place, ahead of Harvard and Cambridge, and a ranking from France's Mines ParisTech has been ridiculed for putting five French universities into the top 20."

However, one should not assume that the forthcoming THE rankings will be biased because

"these concerns give THE great confidence - as an independent magazine we are free from the influence of any institution or authority.

We are accountable only to our readers - an increasingly international community of thousands of academics and university administrators. "


But this raises certain questions. Is THE not accountable to the company that owns it? Another question is that "increasingly international" community. "Increasingly" from what to what? And who are those administrators responsible to?


The national bias of the Paris Mines ranking is indisputable. There the top French institution is in sixth place. In the most recent THE-QS rankings the top French institution was 38th, in the Russian RaTER rankinigs 36th, in the Shanghai Aacademic Ranking of World Universities 40th, in the Taiwan rankings 88th and in Webometrics 129th.



The bias of the Russian rankings is even more glaring. They put Moscow State University in 5th place. In no other ranking did they even get intio the top fifty.


I am not suggesting that there is anything dishonest about the Paris and Russian rankings. The Paris rankings is as transparent as it is possible to be. It simply counts the number of CEOs of top 500 companies who attended particular schools. Everything is in the public record. The Russian rankings are not so transparent. The problem here is that its questionnaire contains many references to indicators specific to Russia and the CIS. It is also written in a style that many people would find close to incomprehensible.


The bias in the Paris and Russian rankings stems not from dishonesty but from the choice of criteria that are likely to give an advantage to universities in their countries while downplaying or ignoring those in which their countries are not so strong.


In contrast, the Shanghai, Taiwan, Webometrics, and Scimargo rankings appear to have no home country bias at all.

What about THE? The old THE- QS rankings were pretty obviously biased in favour of British universities. Last year it had Cambridge in second place. The Shanghai rankings put it in 4th place, although that will not be sustained as the impact of old Nobel winners fades. In the Paris Mines ranking it was 7th, in the Russian rankings 8th, in the Taiwan rankings 15th, in Webometrics 22nd , in Scimargo 34th and in the Leiden green index (the size-independent, field-normalized average impact) 37th.


We will see if Cambridge and Imperial College maintain their suspiciously high places in the new THE rankings. If they start slipping a little I will be inclined to agree that THE has in fact overcome its anglocentric bias.

Article in the Chronicle

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a substantial article on world rankings by Aisha Labi. She describes a number of recent developments

• The European Union "began moving ahead in the development of a nuanced and more complex rankings system". No doubt it will soon start moving as fast as Concorde.
• A Russian ranking was met with derision, even in Russia.
• THE and QS "had an acrimonious split, with each now promising to produce a superior product."

There are some comments from Phil Baty of THE who describes the old rankings as "no longer fit for purpose". He indicates that the new THE rankings will see two improvements. One is a new academic survey that will be larger, better targeted and more representative. The other is some sort of extra weighting for the social science citations.

Meanwhile Ben Sowter of QS defends

"its [QS] continuing emphasis on a peer-review component, adding that it seeks increased input from academics and aims to increase response numbers through measures such as translated surveys for academics in non-English-speaking institutions.

"Of all the measures that different rankings are using at a global level, from my perspective peer review is the one that is fairest to universities with different disciplines," he says. The use of peer reviews "enables institutions with great strengths in the arts and humanities to shine in a way that they are not able to in other measures." "

So it looks like there will be a survey war with THE flaunting the size of its sample and QS stressing the diversity of theirs.

Of course, the last word goes to Nian Cai Liu of Shanghai Jiao Tong University: "We think that more and diversified rankings are good for the higher-education community and the general public in general,"

New Report

A comprehensive and interesting report on university rankings from the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education is available here.

Thanks to Beerkens' Blog

Something from QS

Finally something has appeared on the QS Intelligence Unit Blog. Ben Sowter writes:


"The QS World University Rankings will continue to be published in 2010, albeit through a number of new channels which we are working on. At present, there are no plans to alter the methodology, in fact it seems important to maintain some comparability in a time when a number of new and different interpretations are going to emerge. So in 2010, we are focused on improving our engagement with institutions, redesigning some of our data collection systems to be more user-friendly and intuitive, and our work in specific regional and discipline oriented contexts."

I am not sure that keeping the methodology is a good idea but it is understandable. However, even with the same basic methods there are a couple of minor changes that might help QS find a niche in the "holistic" ranking market as Times Higher appears to focus on making fine distinctions among leading research institutions. One would be to use the academic survey to ask about general excellence or activities other than research. The other would be to remove non-teaching faculty from the faculty totals when calculating faculty student ratio. As it is, the QS rankings are heavily weighted towards research, with an academic survey asking about research, an indicator based on citations and a teaching resources measure that includes researchers who never teach.

Now that QS have done an Asian ranking and are apparently preparing Arab and Latin American ones, they could also also outflank THE by preparing survey forms in additional languages. They offered a Spanish option last year. They ought to have the resources to produce forms in Chinese, French, German. Arabic and Japanese.

Opinion Surveys in University Rankings

In this week's Times Higher Education, Phil Baty discusses the role of reputational surveys in university ranking. It was a distinctive feature of the THE-QS rankings that they devoted 40 % of the weighting to a survey of academic opinion about the research excellence of universities. Baty points out that "The reputation survey used in the now-defunct Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings was one of its most controversial elements: a survey of a tiny number of academics should not determine 40 per cent of a university's score".

It was not so much that a tiny number of academics was surveyed but that a tiny number responded and that this (relatively) tiny number was heavily biased towards particular countries and regions. A very obvious effect of the survey was to boost the position of Oxford and Cambridge well beyond anything they would have attained on indicators based on other more objective factors.

Whether THE can produce a better survey remains to be seen. But at least they have at last stopped calling it a peer review.

The Rise of China

An article in the Financial Times describes the impressive growth of scientific research in China


"China has experienced the strongest growth in scientific research over the past three decades of any country, according to figures compiled for the Financial Times, and the pace shows no sign of slowing.

Jonathan Adams, research evaluation director at Thomson Reuters, said China’s “awe-inspiring” growth had put it in second place to the US – and if it continues on its trajectory it will be the largest producer of scientific knowledge by 2020.

Thomson Reuters, which indexes scientific papers from 10,500 journals worldwide, analysed the performance of four emerging markets countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China, over the past 30 years."

In contrast, the performance of Indian universities and institutes has been rather limp:

" A symptom of this is the poor performance of India in international comparisons of university standards. The 2009 Asian University Rankings, prepared by the higher education consultancy QS, shows the top Indian institution to be IIT Bombay at number 30; 10 universities in China and Hong Kong are higher in the table.

Part of India’s academic problem may be the way red tape ties up its universities, says Ben Sowter, head of the QS intelligence unit. Another issue is that the best institutions are so overwhelmed with applications from would-be students and faculty within India that they do not cultivate the international outlook essential for world-class universities. This looks set to change as India’s human resource minister has stepped up efforts to build links with US and UK institutions. "

A couple of observations. China's research output might not be so impressive if population were taken into account. I also wonder if India's relatively poor performance is the result of a failure to cultivate an international outlook. Is China really so much more international than India? Is it possible that other factors are more important?

Batting for Britain

A notorious feature of the THE-QS rankings was its over-valuation of British and Australian universities. It would seem that Times Higher and Thomson Reuters are not really bothered by this. Indeed it looks like they are set on course to add to this bias in their new rankings, at least as far as British universities are concerned. An opinion piece by Jonathon Adams, the Director of Research Evaluation at Thomson Reuters, echoes previous comments in THE by lamenting the maltreatment of the London School of Economics in the old league table.

"The London School of Economics is generally agreed to be an outstanding institution globally. But how can we judge that? A lot of people would like to study there. If you wanted an informed opinion, you would consult the people who work there. A lot of people who have been there have gone on to great things. These are good indicators that the place is intellectually vibrant and delivers excellent teaching, and those values are endorsed internationally.


Good, but not perfect. Three major problems spring to mind. First, that quick summary tells us there are many ways in which we may value what a university does. It is a knowledge business and a source for teaching, research and dissemination to users. Second, the LSE is a specialist. Its astronomy is weak, so we need to consider subject portfolio. And, third, what will we measure? I need an informed expert to confirm my judgment, but as I can't send my expert to every institution, I need a proxy indicator (not a "metric": an indicator).

Our view of the LSE does not translate readily into anything useful unless we are careful and we make sure our information is appropriate. The LSE stood at only 67th in the last Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings - some mistake surely? Yes, and quite a big one. LSE academics publish papers in social and economic sciences, which have lower citation rates than the natural sciences; so on the simple "citations per paper" used by QS in analysing the Scopus publications data, it slipped way down the list. Not a good way of comparing it with nearby King's College London, which has a huge medical school.

We need a lot more information than has typically been gathered before we can build an even halfway sensible picture of what a university is doing."

The problem with this is that there are many institutions that scored lower than LSE in the rankings that are agreed by some people somewhere to be outstanding. The “good indicators” raise more questions. A lot of people want to study at LSE. Is that because of its intrinsic merits or shrewd marketing? And who is the "you" who would consult the LSE? A lot of its alumni and alumnae have done great things? No doubt many have become MPs, civil servants, university administrators and CEOs but given the current moral condition of British politics and the performance of the British and European economies that might not be something to be proud of.

It is difficult to concur with the claim that LSE has been treated unfairly in previous rankings. In 2009 they were number five for social sciences and 32nd for arts and humanities. They got top marks for international faculty and international students and in the employer review. They did somewhat less well in the academic survey, which had a disproportionate number of respondents from Britain and Commonwealth countries with large numbers of British alumni and alumae, but that is surely to be expected when LSE excels in a very limited range of disciplines.

LSE also did badly in the citations per faculty indicator (not citations per paper – QS used that for their Asian rankings, not the world rankings) partly because it is a specialist social science institution and it is conventional in the social sciences to produce fewer papers and to cite them less frequently but also because LSE actually does not produce as much social science research, as measured by Scopus and ISi publications, as general institutions such as the Universities of Manchester, Birmingham, Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Toronto, Melbourne and Sao Paulo.

It is difficult to think of changes in the structure or content of the rankings that would benefit LSE but not a host of others. Giving extra weighting to social science publications is an excellent idea and would boost LSE relative to King’s College or Imperial College (I wonder if THE is prepared to let Imperial slip a few places) but it would probably help US state universities and European universities even more. Counting “contributions to society”, such as sitting on committees and commissions and boards of directors would help LSE a bit but might well help Japanese universities and the French grandes ecoles a lot more.

LSE is a narrowly based specialist institution and QS gave it as much as or more than it deserved by ranking it highly in the social science and arts and humanities categories and putting it in the top 100 in the general world rankings. It is good at what it does but it does not do all that much. It would be a shame if the rankings are going to be restructured to promote it beyond its real merits.

The other item is a Rick Trainor’s review of Robert Zemsky’s book Making Reform Work. In the course of his review Trainor, who is president of King’s College London, says that:

"Most fundamentally, while the US debate is premised on a clear and widespread belief in the great, if imperilled, merits of the US system, British opinion often pays too little attention to the successes of UK universities, even in comparison with their US counterparts. For example, British commentators often overlook UK universities' superior completion rates, the greater rigour concerning undergraduate assessment inherent in the existence of an external examiner system, their greater ability (allowing for the much greater size of the US population and its university system) to attract overseas students and, as suggested by the Sainsbury report, their arguably superior record in commercialisation.

Of course, this is not to suggest that the UK higher education system is perfect, any more than US universities are. Nonetheless, there has been too little recognition in the UK of its high international research standing (aided by rises in public investment in recent years), despite persisting American strength and rapidly rising competition from countries such as China and India. Likewise, the UK system receives too little credit domestically for its success in protecting standards despite the huge increase in UK student numbers during the past 25 years. Similarly too few observers on this side of the Atlantic have learned one of the basic lessons propounded by Zemsky: that outstanding achievement in higher education depends on adequate resources - for teaching (which was substantially underfunded, even before the UK's public expenditure crisis began) as well as for research. "

This is a rather odd set of claims. Superior completion rate? I wonder how that happened. Greater rigour because of the external examiner system? Really? Do British universities still have a high international research standing? Just look at their performance on the Shanghai rankings, after removing the cushion of the thirty percent weighting for Nobel and Fields laureates. Have standards really been protected? Would more money make any difference?

It is beginning to look as though an implicit consensus is developing in the British higher educational establishment that the rankings should reflect its self-serving view of the merits of British higher education and that they have an important role to play in fending off the economic crisis. It appears that THE and Thomson Reuters are only too happy to oblige.

Is anything happening at QS?

Although there has been a lot of activity, so far mainly rhetorical, at Times Higher Education and Thomson Reuters about their forthcoming rankings, nothing has been heard from QS apart from an advert for a manager of a university ranking for Latin America and Iberia.

Nothing has been added to the 2010 ranking news page since December and Ben Sowter’s blog has been silent for a month.

Are they preparing a response to THE or are they just fading away?

The Kiplinger Rankings are Out


Kiplinger has produced its 2009-2010 ranking of US universities. This is very much a student consumer ranking that measures the value for money delivered by each institution. It is based on information about student debt, tuition costs, financial aid, gender ratio, class size and average SAT scores, among others.

There is no doubt a lot of room for argument about the validity of the data and how the indicators were weighted but this sort of index does seem very useful.

I am wondering if something like this can be incorporated into existing international rankings. A lot of Kiplingers's data would be difficult or impossible to obtain outside the US but information about things like tuition fees, gender ratio, class size, and number of books in the library is widely available.

The top five private universities are:

1. Caltech
2. Princeton
3. Yale
4. Rice
5. Harvard

The top five public schools (for out-of-state students) are:

1. SUNY Binghamton
2. SUNY College at Geneseo
3. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
4. University of Florida
5. College of New Jersey

The European Union Rankings

The European Union is trying to develop a new ranking system to rival the existing ones. The motivation is fairly transparent. The object, as reported in the EUObserver is "to improve the ranking of European universities and improve Europe's economic power".

The EUObserver provides an excellent and succinct summary of the forces underlying the universities ranking boom.

"This means the rankings are increasingly receiving more attention for different specific purposes: Students use them to short-list their choice of university; public and private institutions use them to decide on funding allocations; universities use them to promote themselves; while some politicians use them as a measure of national economic achievements or aspirations. "

It seems that planning for the new rankings took place in the second half of 2009 and that in the first half of 2010 it will be tested on 150 institutions around the world, but only for engineering and business studies.

At that rate, THE, QS and Shanghai Jiao Tong University have nothing to worry about.

Global Institutional Profiles Project

Thomson Reuters have set up a new site here. It contains information, although not much so far, about the new Times Higher ranking system.

They will "address industry concerns over current profile systems... The 21st century research institution has many fluid layers, and Thomson Reuters is committed to developing an equally robust and dynamic dataset".

Notice that they are talking about research institutions as though universities do nothing but research and that they refer to higher education as an industry.

The page provides some hints about what might be included in the forthcoming rankings: peer review, scholarly outputs, citation patterns, funding levels and faculty characteristics.

I do not know whether there is any significance in the absence of internationalisation and faculty student ratio from the list.

The page could have done with some editing. There are too many barely meaningful adjectives -- robust, dynamic, flexible, data-driven, globally significant. And exactly what is a "fluid layer"?

Webometrics Out Soon

The next edition of the Webometrics rankings will be published at the end of January. Watch this space.

www.webometrics.info

The THE Reputational Survey

Thomson Reuters, acting on behalf of Times Higher Education, have published an open letter to university administrators announcing the development of a new ranking system. They promise much. The new ranking is the only one that "seeks to fundamentally change the way data is collected and analyzed". They believe "this development underscores a major breakthrough within the rankings dialogue".

There is some good news. Finally, the inaccurate term "peer review" is being dropped to be replaced by "reputational survey". Also, according to a comment on a previous post from Phil Baty, Deputy Editor at THE, "we will be looking to focus the survey more on non-research elements. It allows us to get at the less tangible elements of university activity that can not be measured through numbers." This is very sensible.

The two points above are welcome but I still do not see anything very revolutionary about the forthcoming survey.

There is another question. Thomson Reuters are asking university administrators to encourage their researchers and colleagues to take part. This would seem to introduce an element of bias into the survey from the very start. How many university administrators will read the open letter? How many will act on it? Will there be as many in Japan as in England?

What does this say about Nigerian Universities?

According to University World News, Nigerian banks prefer to recruit holders of polytechnic diplomas rather than university graduates. One bank manager said that diploma holders could perform most of the tasks normally done by graduates for less pay and did not require extensive computer literacy training.

I wonder if this would show up in any of the current university rankings.

Something about Ipsos MORI

Anyone interested in Ipsos MORI, the company appointed to conduct a survey of academic opinion for Times Higher Education can go here or have a look at the column to the left.

It seems that they have a number of junior staff outside the UK, or at least a lot of telephone interviewers, so that does to some extent allay one of my concerns about the company.

However the biodata for the senior staff is rather disconcerting. Some snippets:

"after graduating from Oxford University"
"has worked closely with both Conservative and Labour ministers ... as well as a wide range of local authorities and NHS trusts"
"served as Finance Director of BMRB"
"started her career at the BBC"
"has been a User Fellow at the centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion at LSE and spent time working in the Prime Minister's Stategy Unit"
"a member of the MRQSA council"
"a full member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing"
"member of the council of Roehamton University"
"has chaired a number of round-table discussions with senior peers"
"has a BSc, MSc and MBA from Imperial College"

Very British (and just a little bit cosmopolitan -- "speaks five European languages", "always busy cookng up the next plan to explore to a far flung destination"), very establishment, rather politically correct and perhaps a little inward looking -- in much of the world, working with British government ministers, peers and the NHS is not something you would want to boast about.

Will a survey carried out by such a group reveal that in most respects places like Oxford, LSE and Imperial College are performing increasingly less well than leading American and Japanese universities?

In case you thought ranking was just a bit of fun


NTU ACCUSES SPANISH RANKING INSTITUTE OF LIBEL

The National University of Taiwan is protesting about a statement on the webometrics site that some universities had resorted to 'bad practices."

The practices consisted of hosting papers written by authors at other institutions. As well as NTU, webometrics referred to the University of Sao Paulo.

Other universities are listed as having more than one webdomain. These include the University of Maryland, the University of Manchester, Yonsei University, Korea University, Chiang Mai University, The Indian Institutes of Technology at Delhi and Kharagpur, Kuwait University and the University of Bahrein

Does Size Really Matter?
Times Higher Education (THE) are keeping the "peer review" but possibly with new questions. According to a recent article they will be using the British pollsters Ipsos MORI to collect data.

"So we are delighted to confirm that for the 2010 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, our new rankings partner Thomson Reuters has commissioned one of the world's leading polling companies, Ipsos Mori, to carry out research to support the peer-review element of the tables. Using a professional polling company means that we can inject proper targeting and transparency into the process while ensuring that we get a much larger response rate than in the past - the aim is for at least 25,000 responses in 2010. It also means that the questions in the opinion survey can be carefully crafted to elicit meaningful and consistent responses while ensuring that every respondent knows what is being asked of them. "

THE seems to be overly concerned with the number of respondents, claiming that the 9,000 plus of the 2009 THE-QS rankings was an inadequate number to represent the millions of academics of one sort or another around the world. They are right to be concerned but the number of respondents is not the main determinant of the validity of any survey. What matters more is the extent to which the sample is representative of the population about which data is sought. If THE and if Ipsos MORI are going to do no more than get a lot of people to fill out online forms then their new survey will be little better than the old one.

If the rankings industry is going to descend into a squabble about who's got the biggest survey then QS might be able to trump THE. They could revive their retired respondents from 2004-06, purchase a large stash of email addresses from Mardev, make the survey more user-friendly (tick boxes instead of typing names) and they might well be able to get above the 25,000 mark.

The choice of Ipsos MORI, whose offices are in London, Harrow, Manchester, Edinburgh, Belfast and Dublin might be an indicator of a narrowing of vision. THE's editorial board, which seems to have become more active of late, is predominantly British with a heavy bias towards officialdom. Discussion about rankings in THES seems rather anglocentric. A subtle slip was Phil Baty's recent reference to "overseas" universities. They may be overseas to you but you are overseas to them and everybody else.

Whither the QS Rankings?

While Times Higher Education is looking around for a new methodology, QS, judging from a recent conversation with Ben Sowter and Tony Martin and comments on its website, appears set on continuing with the old system perhaps with a bit of tweaking.

The need to maintain some sort of continuity is understandable, especially after the yo-yoing of some universities in recent editions of the THE-QS rankings. However, criticism of the rankings is such that it would seem a good idea to seize the opportunity to make some simple changes.

The least liked element of the THE-QS rankings of 2004-09 was the "peer review". It had, being based on the mailing lists of a Singapore-based publishing company with links to Imperial College London, an obvious geographical bias. The declared response rate was too low to meet conventional standards of face validity. Its weighting was too high. As a survey of research expertise it was quite redundant since citations are a far better measure of research impact and quality.

Furthermore, the "peer review" added to the overemphasis on research. The THE-QS rankings gave a 20 % weighting to citations, the faculty student ratio gave a big and obvious boost to universities with large numbers of non-teaching research-only faculty and then there was 40% for a research-based survey.

I would like to suggest a simple change. Keep the survey of academic opinion (and stop calling it a peer review because it is nothing of the sort) but use it to assess the general excellence or reputation, perhaps including teaching and student satisfaction, of universities. It is not credible that someone with a functioning mouse can sign up for the World Scientific list and became competent to assess the research performance of universities but he or she might have some idea of the general reputation of institutions. This would require minimal changes to the current procedure: all that is needed is to change the questions.

A couple of other refinements might be in order. The division of the academic world into three super-regions for weighting purposes is too crude. Latin America, Africa, Southwest Asia and Southeast Asia deserve to be treated as separate regions.

Telling everybody that you have sent 180,000 e-mails is asking for trouble if you are going to get a negligible response. It would be better to use the World Scientific lists to accumulate a list of people willing to participate in the survey, combine it with names collected from various events and then send out the survey. If nothing else, the response rate would be a little more respectable.

A Ranking from SCImago

Tekmillinen Korkeakoulu-Tekniska Hogskolen in the top 400
Ollscoil Luimnigh just misses top 1000
Good showing by Debreceni Egyetem

SCImago, a research group based on Spanish universities has published SIR, SCImago Institutions Rankings, has published its 2009 report which includes a ranking of 2124 institutions, including research centres as well as universities.

There are five indicators, one of which, the number of publications in Scopus-indexed journals, is used for ranking.

There are some positive things about this ranking. It uses Scopus data: anything which reduces the emerging Thomson Reuters monopoly is welcome. It ranks more than two thousand places. It is quite transparent: I have checked a few institutions and the figures seem accurate.

The most striking thing about this index is that it shows that a vast amount of research is being done outside universities. The top three places for research output go to government research centres in France, China and Russia, lending support to French claims that current ranking systems fail to take account of their distinctive system of higher education and research.

One irritating thing about these rankings is the eccentric naming policy. Japanese universities are referred to by their Japanese names but Korean and Chinese ones are in English. Some New Zealand universities are listed with English and Maori names but the Universities of Auckland and Waikato are only in English. Dublin Institute of Technology is in Irish but Trinity College Dublin is in English. Some Saudi institutions are in English and some in Arabic. Three Israeli universities are in Catalan (or German without the umlaut!)

An Ancient Dinosaur Reborn?

Times Higher Education and some of its readers seem to be concerned about what they think is the low position of the London School of Economics (LSE) in previous rankings. It is true that institutions that specialise in the social sciences and humanities suffer from any ranking based on citations and publications since they produce longer and fewer papers with fewer authors and more books and use citations more sparingly than do those in the natural sciences and medicine. However, this seems to affect universities like Yale and Princeton as much as LSE. It would be quite simple for rankers to use some sort of weighting to reduce the disadvantage of such places and it would be an improvement if THE were to do this in any future ranking system.

But the concern with LSE is rather suspicious. Should specialist institutions be regarded as the equal of universities that excel in all disciplines? Perhaps THE should also think about the overrating of Oxford and Cambridge (take away the peer review from the THE-QS rankings of 2004-09 or the alumni and awards indicators from the Shanghai rankings and see where they are) as they discuss their new system.

It might be worth recalling a comment made by a THE reader back in October.


"It is always quite interesting to see that British institutions are still regarded as the top of the world. (I just compare it with the FT MBA rankings as well, where UK institutions dominate all rankings). As someone from the continent I only can say "Long live the British Empire!" It seems to me that the stereotype of British domination is still very alive in UK. A closer look at the British economy, engineering and scientifc achievements, however, reveals the the mental fraud. Travelling across UK, I often realize that UK is frozen in time. Sometimes the technology, housing and machines are like from a 3rd world. London Metro is like from 1899. Trains across the country are like in the 30s. Communication technology is like mid of last century. I would have reasoned that with all the best universities, as you have figured out yourself, only bright scientist and engineers evolve. It's an illusion. Travel across Europe, marvel at French TGV trains, drive German cars and have a look at Spanish solar power plants and you will see that others, with officially inferior schooling systems, have achieved far more. Your university ranking is an illusion, buried in century long self-perception of world dominance. I am sorry to write that, but it is true. The British dominance is long gone, same with academic instituions. Your ranking list is an ancient dinosaur."

Whither the Times Higher Rankings?

Times Higher Education has announced that it will be producing a new ranking system to replace the THE-QS World University Rankings.

THE does not seem to have much idea about where it is going. Its advisory committe (it would be interesting to find out who they are) is reported to have complained that the number of respondents in the peer review is too small and that the citations indicator is biased against the social sciences and the humanities.

Neither of these is very helpful. The small number of respondents is not for lack of trying by QS. They have been sending out nearly 200,000 e-mails a year. I doubt if there is very much anyone can do get many more respondents. What could be done and should be done is to improve the validity of the survey by clearly identifying the group whose opinion is being sought or using databases that are less obviously biased. The second problem could be dealt with quite easily by assigning appropriate weighting to the various dsicipline clusters.

THE has also published comments from readers about future directions for its rankings. Some of these seem unaware of the basic methods of the THE-QS rankings. One, for example wants to see an "increased number of academics interviewed" -- QS never interviewed anyone for its survey. Others want the rankings to include criteria that are of limited global comparabilty such as starting salaries or graduate job prospects.

Several readers are unhappy with what they feel is the unfairly low position of LSE. This would seem misplaced. The rankings are supposed to be of universities not of research institutes and offering a full range of courses ought to be a significant element in the assessment of a university.

Other readers are sceptical about the significance of internationalisation and there appears to be division about whether citations are an adaequate nmeasure of research quality.

The response so far appears to be predominantly British. If THE are going to listen to their readers it is likely that the obvious pro-British and even pro-Oxbridge bias of the old rankings will continue.

Anyone interested in taking part in a survey by Thomson Reuters and THE can do so by going here.