Comments on the New Edition of the THE Reputation Rankings

Times Higher Education (THE) have just published the latest edition of their World Reputation Rankings. At the top, it is business as usual. We have the big six super brands, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Stanford, Cambridge, and Berkeley. After that, there are no real surprises. The top fifty includes  Ivy League schools like Princeton and Yale, rising Asian giants like Tsinghua, Tokyo and the National University of Singapore, established European institutions like LMU Munich and KU Leuven, and well-known London colleges, LSE and UCL.

But then things start to get interesting. THE has introduced some drastic methodological changes, and these have led to a significant amount of churning.   

A bit of context, last year, the reputation rankings recorded an apparently remarkable achievement by nine Arab universities that came into the top 200 from nowhere. Later, THE announced that they had discovered a "syndicate" that was trading votes in the reputation surveys and that measures would be taken to stop that and penalise the universities involved.

But THE was not satisfied with that, and they have revamped its methodology to include two new metrics in addition to the simple counting of votes for best universities for teaching and research.

The first of these is pairwise comparison. This means, according to THE, that universities are preselected "informed from their publication history," and respondents then place them in order from 1 to 5, thus encouraging them to consider places other than the super brands. Exactly how that preselection works is not clear.

The second is voter diversity, which rewards universities if they have more countries and more subjects in their respondent base, which, THE claims, indicates a strong reputation. 

Whatever THE's intentions, the overall result of these changes is clear. The USA, UK, Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland have all increased the number of universities in the top 200. 

The biggest gainers are the UK, which has increased its representation in the top 200 from 20 to 24; Switzerland, which has gone from 4 to 7; and the Netherlands, which has also added another three universities.

Of the twenty British universities in the top 200, eleven have risen, seven are in the same rank or band, and only two, Birmingham and Sheffield, have fallen. It is hard to believe that there has been such a widespread improvement in the international reputation of British universities. 

In contrast, the new methodology has been disastrous for universities in China, Russia, the Arab region, India, Israel, Japan, and South Korea. 

The number of Chinese universities in the top 200 has fallen from 15 to 8. While Tsinghua and Peking Universities have retained their places, others have fallen, Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 43rd  place to 58th, the University of Science and Technology China from 61-70 to 101-150, and Harbin Institute of Technology from 101-125 to  201-300.

Russia has fared even worse. There were six greyed-out Russian universities in the 2023 rankings. Now, there are just two, Lomonosov Moscow State University, in 83rd place, down from 34th, and Bauman Moscow State Technical University, down from 60-70 to 201-300. The latter gets 1.7 points in the pairwise comparison. All of the others are gone.

In 2023, there were four Indian universities in the rankings, the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institutes of Technology Bombay, Delhi, and Madras. Now, IIT Bombay has been removed altogether, and the Indian Institute of Science and the IITs Delhi and Madras have been demoted to the 201-300 band. They are joined by Siksha 'O' Anuhandsan, which has a global research rank of 1900 in the US News Best Global Universities. 

The worst-hit area is the Arab Region. Universities in Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have left. The only Arab university now is King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which does not teach undergraduates.

A glimpse of the impact of the new metrics can be seen by looking at the universities that come at the bottom for each metric. 

For voter counts, the ten worst universities are all European, followed by a handful of Australian and Canadian universities and Siksha 'O' Anuhandsan, suggesting that it is the new indicators that keep them in the ranking.

For pairwise comparison, the bottom is quite diverse; there is Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Liverpool University, the University of Buenos Aires, Beijing Normal Univerity, Universite Paris Cite, and the University of Cape Town.

The universities that do worst for voter diversity are mainly South Korean, Indian, Turkish, and Japanese. 

It seems then that one function of the new methodology is to slow down the advance of Asian universities and maintain the status of the Western elite. 

THE is shocked, shocked ...

We are repeatedly told that the TimesHigher Education (THE) university rankings are trusted by students, governments, and other stakeholders. Perhaps they are. Whether they should be is another matter. 

Last October, THE announced the results of its World University Rankings, and there was a chorus of lamentation from leading Australian universities, among others, who apparently trusted THE. It seems that the debate over restricting the admission of international students has damaged the country's reputation, and that has been reflected in the THE reputation survey. which contributes disproportionately to THE's teaching and research "pillars." That has led to declining overall scores, which will be the start of a vicious downward spiral. British and American universities also bemoaned the decline in ranking scores, supposedly due to the lack of funding from hard-hearted governments.

For many academics and administrators, THE has become the arbiter of excellence and a credible advisor to the agencies that dominate Western economy and society. It has even become a preferred analyst for the WEF, which is supposed to represent the finest minds of the corporate global world. This is quite remarkable since there is a big mismatch between THE's pretensions to excellence and its actual practice. 

A recent example was the publication of a story about how THE's data analysts had detected collusive activity among some universities in order to boost their scores in the reputation surveys that make up a substantial part of the THE World University Rankings and their various derivatives.

On October 24, David Watkins of THE announced that a "syndicate" had been detected where universities supported each other in the THE Arab reputation survey to the exclusion of non-members. Exactly who those members were was not announced, but it probably included the nine universities that made it to the top 200 in THE World Reputation Survey announced in February 2024, the data for which was included in THE world ranking announced in October  2024. It might also include some universities that had made sudden and surprising gains in the Arab University Rankings announced in November 2023, and the World University Rankings announced last October.

There is a whiff of hypocrisy here. THE is apparently getting upset because universities have probably been doing something that the rankers have condoned or at least ignored. There were signs that something was a bit off as far back as the Arab University Rankings in November 2023. These showed surprisingly good performances from several universities that had performed poorly or not at all in other rankings. In particular, universities in the Emirates were rising while those in Egypt were falling. This was interesting because the results were announced at a summit held in Abu Dhabi that featured several speakers from the Emirates, a development reminiscent of the 2014 summit in Qatar when Texas A and M Qatar was proclaimed the top MENA university based on precisely half a highly cited researcher followed by a similar summit in the UAE in 2015 when that university -- actually a program that has now been wound up -- disappeared, and  United Arab Emirates University advanced to fifth place.

Meanwhile,  between October 2023  and January 2024, THE was conducting their survey of academic opinion for the World University Rankings. Before 2021, they had relied on survey data supplied by Clarivate, but now the survey has been brought in-house. That, it now appears, was not a good idea. The number of survey respondents soared, and there was a disproportionate number of respondents from the UAE. In February 2024, THE published the results of its reputation survey, which would later become a part of the world rankings. 

THE listed only the top 200 universities and gave exact scores for the top fifty.  The interesting thing was that nine Arab universities were included whose reputation scores were below the scores for academic reputation in the QS World University Rankings rankings, the scores for global research reputation in the US News Best Global Universities ranking, or scores in the Round University Rankings, if they were actually ranked at all and below their previous scores.  They were also above the scores achieved by leading universities in the region in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Lebanon, and they appeared unrelated to other indicators. 

It was probably not only Arab universities. Egor Yablokov of E --  Quadrat Science and Education identified several universities whose reputation score appears disproportionate to the overall scores for the THE world rankings.

When the 2025 WUR rankings appeared in October of last year, there were more signs that something was amiss. Universities in the UAE  including Abu Dhabi University and Khalifa University, also in Abu Dhabi, did much better than in previous editions or in other rankings. There were other apparent anomalies. Al Ahliyaa Amaan University was ahead of the University of Jordan, the Lebanese American University higher than the American University of Beirut,  the American University of the Middle East higher than Kuwait University, Future University in Egypt, and the Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology higher than Cairo University and Al Azhar. 

Then came the Arab University Rankings. It appears that THE had now taken action against the "syndicate", resulting in them dropping significantly. 

In addition to this, there are some trends that require explanation. Many universities in Saudi Arabia and UAE have fallen significantly, while some in Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq have risen.  Applied Science Private University, Jordan, has risen from 91-100 to 25, Al Ahliyya Amman University, also in Jordan, from 91-100 to  28, Ahlia University in  Bahrain from unranked to 17th, Cairo University from  28 to 8, the University of Baghdad from 40 to 20, Mustansiriyah University, Baghdad from 71-80 to 37, An Najah National University, Palestine, 81-90 to 23, and Dhofar University, Oman, from 101-120 to 49. 

So, THE have allocated a whopping 41% weighting for reputation, of which 23% is for research reputation, for their Arab University Rankings, compared to 25% for their Asian rankings and 33% for the Latin American rankings. They have  introduced a new metric, collaboration within the Arab world, taken over the research and teaching survey from Elsevier, increased the number of respondents, organized prestigious summits, and offered a variety of consultancy arrangements. All of this would create an environment in which exclusive agreements were likely to flourish.

The extreme fluctuations resulting from THE's changes to the reputation indicators have seriously undermined THE's credibility, or at least they ought to. It would be better for everybody if THE simply returned the administration of the reputation survey to Elsevier and stuck to event management, where it is unsurpassed. 

 

Are Australian universities really on a precipice?

  

Times Higher Education (THE) recently published the latest edition of their World University Rankings (WUR), which contained bad news for Australian higher education. The country’s leading universities have fallen down the rankings, apparently because of a decline in their scores for research and teaching reputation scores and international outlook, that is international students, staff, and collaboration.

THE has reported that Angel Calderon of RMIT had said that the “downturn had mainly been driven by declining scores in THE’s reputation surveys” and that he was warning that there was worse to come.

Australian universities have responded by demanding that the cap on international students be lifted to avoid financial disaster. Nobody seems to consider how the universities got to the point where they could not survive without recruiting researchers and students from abroad.

It is, however, a mistake to predict catastrophe from a single year’s ranking. Universities have thousands of faculty, employees, and students and produce thousands of patents, articles, books, and other outputs. If a ranking produces large-scale fluctuations over the course of a year, that might well be due to deficiencies in the methodology rather than any sudden change in institutional quality.

There are now several global university rankings that attempt to assess universities' performance in one way or another. THE is not the only one, nor is it the best, and in some ways, it is the worst or nearly the worst.  For universities to link their public image to a single ranking, or even a single indicator, especially one that is as flawed as THE, is quite risky.

To start with, THE is very opaque. Unlike QS, US News, National Taiwan University, Shanghai Ranking, Webometrics, and other rankings, THE does not provide ranks or scores for each of the metrics that it uses to construct the composite or overall score. Instead, they are bundled together in five “pillars”. It is consequently difficult to determine exactly what causes a university to rise or fall in any of these pillars. For example, an improvement in the teaching pillar might be due to increased institutional income, fewer students, fewer faculty, an improved reputation for teaching, more doctorates, fewer bachelor degrees awarded, or some combination of these or some of these.

Added to this are some very dubious results from the THE world and regional rankings over the years. Alexandria University, Aswan University, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Anglia Ruskin University, Panjab University, Federico Santa Maria Technical University, Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences, and the University of Perediniya have been at one time or another among the supposed world leaders for research quality measured by citations. Leaders for industry income, which is claimed to reflect knowledge transfer, have included Anadolu University, Asia University, Taiwan, the Federal University of Itajubá, and Makerere University,

The citations indicator has been reformed and is now the research quality indicator, but there are still some oddities at its upper level, such as Humanitas University, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Australian Catholic University, and St George’s, University of London, probably because they participated in a few highly cited multi-author medical or physics projects.

It now seems that the reputation indicators in the THE WUR are producing results that are similarly lacking in validity. Altogether, reputation counts for 33%, divided between the research and teaching pillars. A truncated version of the survey with the top 200 universities, the scores of fifty of which were provided, was published earlier this year, and the full results were incorporated in the recent world rankings.

Until 2021 THE used the results of a survey conducted by Elsevier among researchers who had published in journals in the Scopus database. After that THE brought the survey in-house and ran it themselves. That may have been a mistake. THE is brilliant at convincing journalists and administrators that it is a trustworthy judge of university quality, but it is not so good at actually assessing such quality, as the above examples demonstrate.

After bringing the survey in-house, THE increased the number of respondents from 10,963 in 2021 to 29,606 in 2022. 38,796 in 2023 and 55,689 in 2024. It seems that this is a different kind of survey since the new influx of respondents is likely to contain fewer researchers from countries like Australia. One might also ask how such a significant increase was achieved.

Another issue is the distribution of survey responses by subject. In 2021 a THE post on the reputation ranking methodology indicated the distribution of responses among academic by which the responses were rebalanced. So, while there were 9.8% computer science responses this was reduced to reflect a 4.2% proportion of international researchers. It seems that this information has not been provided for the 2022 or 2023 reputation surveys.

In 2017 I noted that Oxford’s reputation score tracked the percentage of THE survey responses from the arts and humanities, rising when there are more respondents from those fields and falling when there are fewer. So, the withholding of information about the distribution of responses by subjects is also significant since this could affect the ranking of Australian universities.

Then we have the issue of the geographical distribution of responses. THE has a long-standing policy of recalibrating its results to align with the number of researchers in a country, based on the number of researchers in countries according to data submitted and published by UNESCO.

There are good reasons to be suspicious of data emanating from UNESCO, some of which have been presented by Sasha Alyson.                               

But even if the data were totally accurate, there is still a problem that a university’s rise or fall in reputation might simply be due to a change in the relative number of researchers reported by government departments to the data crunching machines at THE.

According to UNESCO, the number of researchers per million inhabitants in Australia and New Zealand fell somewhat between 2016 and 2021. On the other hand, the number rose for Western Asia, Southern Asia, Eastern Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Northern Africa.

If these changes are accurate, it means that some of Australia's declining research reputation is due to the increase in researchers in other parts of the world and not necessarily to any decline in the quality or quantity of its research.

Concerns about THE's reputation indicators are further raised by looking at some of the universities that did well in the recent reputation survey.

Earlier this year, THE announced that nine Arab universities had achieved the distinction of reaching the top 200 of the reputation rankings, although none were able to reach the top 50, where the exact score and rank were given. THE admitted that the reputation of these universities was regional rather than local. In fact, as some observers noted at the time, it was probably less than regional and primarily national.

It was not Arab universities' rising in the reputation rankings that was disconcerting. Quite a few leading universities from that region have begun to produce significant numbers of papers, citations, and patents and attract the attention of international researchers, but they were not among those doing so well in THE’s reputation rankings.

Then, last May, THE announced that it had detected signs of “possible relationships being agreed between universities”  and that steps would be taken, although not, it would seem, in time for the recent WUR.

More recently, a LinkedIn post by Egor Yablonsky, CEO of E-Quadratic Science & Education, reported that a few European universities had significantly higher reputation scores than the overall world rankings.

Another reason Australia should be cautious of the THE rankings and their reputation metrics is that Australian universities' ranks in the THE reputation rankings are much lower than they are for Global Research Reputation in the US News (USN) Best Global Universities or Academic Reputation in the QS World rankings.

In contrast, some French, Chinese and Emirati universities do noticeably better in the THE reputation ranking than they do in QS or USN.

 

Table: Ranks of leading Australian universities

University	THE reputation 2023	USN global research reputation 2024-2025	QS academic reputation 2025
Melbourne	51-60	43	21
Sydney	61-70	53	30
ANU	81-90	77	36
Monash	81-90	75	78
Queensland	91-100	81	50
UNSW Sydney	126-150	88	43

 

It would be unwise to put too much trust in the THE reputation survey or in the world rankings where it has nearly a one-third weighting. There are some implausible results this year, and it stretches credibility that the American University of the Middle East has a better reputation among researchers than the University of Bologna, National Taiwan University, the Technical University of Berlin, or even UNSW Sydney. THE has admitted that some of these results may be anomalous, and it is likely that some universities will fall after THE takes appropriate measures.

Moreover, the reputation scores and ranks for the leading Australian universities are significantly lower than those published by US News and QS. It seems very odd that Australian universities are embracing a narrative that comes from such a dubious source and is at odds with other rankings. It is undeniable that universities in Australia are facing problems. But it is no help to anyone to let dubious data guide public policy.

So, please, will all the Aussie academics and journalists having nervous breakdowns relax a bit and read some of the other rankings or just wait until next year when THE will probably revamp its reputation metrics.

 

Is something happening in China?

The National Taiwan University rankings have been overlooked by the Western media, which is a shame since they can provide useful and interesting insights. 

For example, there are indicators for articles in the SCIE and the SSCI of the Web of Science database over 11 years and over the current year, which for this year's edition is 2023. For both metrics, the top scorer, which in these cases is Harvard, is assigned a score of 100, and the others are calibrated accordingly.

If a university has a score for the one-year indicator that is significantly higher than the score for eleven years, it is likely that they have made significant progress during 2023 compared to the previous decade. Conversely, if a university does much better for the eleven-year indicator than for the current year, it could mean that it has entered a period of low productivity.

Looking at the current ranking, we notice that most leading US, British, and Australian universities are doing well for the current year, with the notable exceptions of the Los Angeles, Berkeley, San Diego, and Davis campuses of the University of California. Saudi universities also do well, but French universities are down for the year.

The big story here is that Chinese universities do much worse for the current year than the 11-year period. Here are the Article scores for five leading institutions:

Tsinghua University 57.9  for eleven years and  47.2 for the current year

Zhejiang  University 64.7 and 55.4

Shanghai Jiao Tong University 65 and 52.8

Peking University 57.1 and 48

Sun Yat-Sen University 54.1 and 47.1.

And so on and so on.

So what is going on? I can think of several possible explanations. Firstly, we are seeing the temporary effect of the Covid restrictions, and soon we shall see a rebound.

Secondly, this is the beginning of a new period of decline for Chinese sciences, and we shall see a further decline in the next few years.

Thirdly, and I think most plausibly, China has lost interest in engagement with the West, whether this means partnerships with elite institutions, publications in scientific journals, or participation in surveys and rankings. This aligns with the abstention from the THE Impact rankings. the lack of data submission to the TOP 500 international ranking of supercomputers, and low scores in the   QS sustainability rankings, which suggests a lack of interest in those metrics.

Whatever the reason, we should have a better idea over the next year or two.

 

China vs the West: Snow’s ‘two culture’ theory goes global

 

Published today in University World News

In 1959, C P Snow, a British scientist, civil servant and novelist, created a stir with a lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”. The two cultures were led by natural scientists and literary intellectuals.

There was no doubt about where Snow stood with regard to the cultures. Scientists, he said, had “the future in their bones”, and he was disdainful of those who were ignorant of the basic laws of physics.

He believed that Britain’s stagnation after the Second World War was the result of the domination of public life by humanities graduates and the marginalisation of natural scientists.

Snow’s lecture was met with an equally famous ad hominem blast from the Cambridge literary critic, F R Leavis, which probably did Snow more good than harm. Leavis may, however, have had a prescient point when he talked about how science had destroyed the organic communities of the pre-industrial world.

At the time, his nostalgia was largely misplaced. Those who lived in the villages and farms of England had little reluctance about moving, as did my forebears, to the cotton mills of Derbyshire and the coal mines of South Wales, but, looking at a world where every human instinct has become digital media fodder, Leavis might have been onto something.

It now looks like we have something like Snow’s two cultures emerging at the global level with their centres in China, and in North America and Western Europe.

India and the THE Impact Rankings

The World Economic Forum (WEF), supposedly the voice of the global economic and political elites, recently published an article by Phil Baty, Chief Global Affairs Officer of Times Higher Education (THE), about Indian universities and their apparent progress towards world-class status, shown by their participation and performance in the THE Impact Rankings, which measure universities’ contributions to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This is misleading and irresponsible. Participation, or even a high score, in the Impact Rankings, whether overall or for specific indicators, has little, if anything, to do with the ability of universities to provide instruction in academic and professional subjects or to pursue research, scholarship, and innovation. Indeed, it is difficult to see how many of the criteria used in the Impact Rankings are relevant to attaining the SDGs.

The article begins by quoting Philip Altbach, who said in  2012   that India was a world-class country without world-class universities. That in itself is an interesting comment. If a country can be world-class without world-class universities, then one wonders if such universities are really essential.

There is a bit of bait and switch here. Whatever Altbach meant by world-class in 2012, I doubt that he was referring to performance in meeting the UN’s SDGs.

Baty goes on to claim that Indian universities are improving, and this is shown by Indian universities submitting data for THE impact rankings, which assess universities' contribution to the SDGs, 125 compared with 100 from Türkiye and 96 from Pakistan, out of a total of  2152 universities around the world.

That sounds impressive. However, submissions to the impact rankings and other THE products are voluntary, as THE often points out. There is no real merit involved in filling out the forms except perhaps showing a need to be ranked for something.

In any case, according to the uniRank site, there are 890 higher education institutions in India, 174 in Türkiye, and 176 in Pakistan. That means that the participation rate is about 14% for India, 57% for Türkiye, and 55% for Pakistan. India's participation in THE Impact Rankings is less than that of Pakistan and Türkiye, and in previous years, it has been much less than that of countries like Algeria, Iran, and Iraq.

Nor does gaining a high score in the Impact Rankings tell us very much. Universities are ranked on their four best scores. Many universities simply submit data for five or six goals and just ignore the others, for which their actual contribution might well be zero or negative.

These rankings rely heavily on data submitted by universities. Even if everybody concerned with the collection, transfer, and processing of information is totally honest and competent, there are often immense obstacles to data curation confronting universities in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. These rankings may be, in effect, little more than a measure of the ambitions of university leaders and the efficiency of their data analysts.

Moreover, much of the progress toward these goals is measured not by hard, verifiable data but by targets, programs, initiatives, partnerships, facilities, policies, measures, and projects that are subject to an opaque and, one suspects, sometimes arbitrary validation process.

Also, do the criteria measure progress toward the goals? Does producing graduates in law, civil enforcement, and related fields really contribute to peace, justice, and strong institutions? Does a large number of graduates qualified to teach say much about the quality of education?

It might be commendable that a minority of Indian universities, albeit proportionately less than many other countries, have signed up for these rankings and that a few have done well for one or two of the SDGs. It is helpful to know that JSS Academy of Higher Education and Research is apparently a world beater for good health and well-being, Shoolini University of Biotechnology and Management for clean water and sanitation, and Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences for affordable and clean energy, but does this really compensate for the pervasive perceived mediocrity of Indian higher education?

The validity of the Impact Rankings can be checked by comparing them with the UI GreenMetric Rankings, which have measured universities' commitment to environmental sustainability since 2010. Some of the indicators here, such as Energy and Climate Change and Water, are similar, although not identical, to those in the Impact Rankings, but there is almost no overlap between the best-performing universities in the two rankings. No doubt THE would say their rankings are more sophisticated but still, even the least cynical observer might wonder a bit.

The reality is that Indian universities have consistently underperformed in the various global rankings, and this is, on balance, a fairly accurate picture. It is probable that current reforms will bring widespread change, but that is still something on the horizon.

Here, THE has not been helpful. Over the last few years, It has repeatedly exaggerated the achievements of a few Indian institutions that have risen in their world or regional rankings, often due to the dysfunctional citations indicator. These include Panjab University, Vel Tech Rangarajan Dr. Sagunthala R&D Institute of Science and Technology, JSS Academy of Higher Education and Research, and the Ropar and Indore Institutes of Technology. This has caused resentment among leading Indian institutions, who are perplexed by such relatively marginal places zooming ahead of the highly reputable Indian Institutes of Technology of Bombay, Madras, and Delhi.

The article ignores the boycott by the leading Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) of the THE World University Rankings partly because of their opacity, where all the metrics are now bundled into pillars, so it is next to impossible to figure out what is causing movement in the rankings without paying THE for consultation and benchmarking.

Indian universities have not performed well in global rankings. In the Shanghai Rankings, the best performer is the Indian Institute of Science in the 401-500 band, down from 301-400 in 2023. In the CWTS Leiden Ranking, the leading university is the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 284^th place. Compared to China, Japan, and South Korea, India’s performance is rather tepid. The occasional show of excellence with regard to one or two of the SDGs is hardly sufficient compensation.

The current reforms may put Indian research and higher education on track, but India’s problems go deeper than that. There is widespread evidence that the country is lagging far behind in primary and secondary education, and ultimately, that will matter much more than the exploits of universities on the way to meeting sustainability goals.

 

It seems that self-affirmation isn't such a big deal

 

A few years ago, I wrote about a massively cited study in Science, supposedly a leading scientific journal, that claimed to significantly reduce the racial high school achievement gap. The idea was that having low-achieving students write about values important to themselves would start a recursive process leading to an improvement in their relative academic performance. The positive effect of this self-affirmation intervention was conveniently confined to African-American students, which, I suspect, contributed to the paper's acceptance.

I was sceptical, having once taught English in classrooms, that 15 minutes of writing could have such a remarkable impact, and I wondered about whether the abundance of resources, support, and skills in the school under study might have compromised the anonymity of the subjects.

Now it seems that the study was "seriously underpowered" and "always obviously wrong".

How many more politically convenient studies will turn out to be wrong or perhaps even worse than wrong? 

Forget about the Euros, this is really serious

We are told that the failure at the UEFA final was a tragedy for England. Perhaps, but something else happened early in July that should have caused some debate but passed almost unnoticed, namely the publication of the latest edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking.

The release of the Times Higher Education (THE) World University rankings and, to a lesser extent, the global rankings from Shanghai, QS, and US News (USN) are often met with fulsome praise from the media and government officials when national favourites rise in the rankings and lamentations when they fall, but other rankings, often much more reliable and rigorous, are largely ignored.

This is partly because the THE and QS rankings are dominated by American and British universities. Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial College London are in the top ten in the overall tables in these three rankings. This year there was a lot of media talk about Imperial moving ahead of Cambridge and Oxford into second place in the QS rankings, just behind MIT. According to these rankings, British universities are on top of the world and criticism from journalists or politicians would surely be churlish in the extreme. 

It would, however, be a mistake to assume that the big brand rankings are objective judges of academic merit or any other sort. They are biased towards UK universities in a variety of obvious and subtle ways. QS, THE, and USN all include surveys of established academics, and the Shanghai Rankings include Nobel and Fields award winners, some of whom are long gone or retired. THE has three metrics based on income. THE USN, and QS give more weight to citations rather than publications, loading the dice for older and better-funded researchers. 

It seems that British universities have complacently accepted the verdict of these rankings and appear unwilling to consider that they are doing anything less than perfect. When the Sunak government proposed some vague and  bland  changes, the Chief Executive of the London Higher Group of Institutions complained that it was "beyond belief" that the government should have the King speak negatively of the "world-leading higher education and research sector." 

It is perhaps time to look at another ranking, one produced by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University. This provides data on publications with various optional filters for subject group, country, period, and fractional counting. There are also rankings for international and industrial collaboration, open-access publications, and gender equity in research.

CWTS does not, however, publish overall rankings, sponsor spectacular events in prestigious settings, or offer consultations and benchmarking services for non-trivial sums. Consequently, it is usually neglected by the media, university heads, or the grandees of the world economy gathered at WEF forums and the like.

Turning to the latest edition,  starting with the default metric, publications in the Web of Science over the period 2019-2022, we see that Zhejiang University has now overtaken Harvard and moved into first place. In the next few years, it is likely that other Chinese universities like Fudan, Peking, and Tsinghua will join Zhejiang at the peak. 

But the most interesting part of Leiden Ranking is the steady decline of British universities. Oxford is now 25th  in the publications table, down from 14th in 2009-12. That's not too bad, but rather different from the latest QS world ranking, where it is third, US News Best Global Universities, where it is fourth, or THE, where it is first. Oxford is well behind several Chinese universities and also behind, among others, the University of Sao Paulo, Seoul National University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Of course, you could say that this is a crude measure of research activity and that if we look at other metrics, such as publications in the top 10% and the top 1% of journals, then, yes, Oxford does better. The problem is that the high-quality metrics are usually lagging indicators so we can expect Oxford to start declining there also before too long.

When we look at the broad subject tables for publications, there is further evidence of gradual decline.  For Mathematics and  Computer Science, Oxford is 63rd, behind Purdue University, Beijing University of Technology, and the University of New South Wales. In 2009-12 it was 50th. 

For Physical Sciences and Engineering, it is 72nd behind the  University of Tehran, Texas A & M, and Lomonosov Moscow State University. In 2009-12 it was 29th.

It is 64th in Life and Earth Sciences, behind Lanzhou University, the Swedish University of Agricultural Science, and Colorado State University. In 2009-2012 it was 42nd. 

For Biomedical and Health Sciences, it is 39th, behind Duke, University of British Columbia, and Karolinska Institutet; in 2009-2012, it was 27th.

Finally, when it comes to the Humanities and Social Scientists, Oxford remains at the top. It is fourth in the world, just as it was in 2009-2012. 

A glance at some middling British institutions shows the same picture of steady relative decline. Between 2009-2012 and 2019-2022 Reading went from 489th to 719th, Liverpool from 233rd to 302nd, and Cardiff from 190th to 328th. 

It is perhaps unfair to judge complex institutions based on a single metric. Unfortunately, most science, scholarship, and everyday life are based on assigning numbers that may ignore the fine details of indispensable complex phenomena. 

Also, such data does not tell us the full story about teaching and learning, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that British universities are not doing so great there either. 

It seems that the big rankings are exaggerating the merits of British higher education. It is time to take a look at some of the global in  rankings produced in places like the Netherlands (Leiden Ranking), Spain (SCImago), Turkiye (URAP), Georgia (RUR), and Taiwan (NTU rankings).