Proving anything you want from rankings

It seems that university rankings can be used to prove almost anything that journalists want to prove.

Ever since the Brexit referendum experts and pundits of various kinds have been muttering about the dread disease that is undermining or about to undermine the research prowess of British universities. The malignity of Brexit is so great that it can send its evil rays back from the future.

Last year, as several British universities tumbled down the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) world rankings, the Independent claimed that “[p]ost-Brexit uncertainty and long-term funding issues have seen storm clouds gather over UK higher education in this year’s QS World University Rankings”.

It is difficult to figure out how anxiety about a vote that took place on June 24th 2016 could affect a ranking based on institutional data for 2014 and bibliometric data from the previous five years.

It is just about possible that some academics or employers might have woken up on June 24th to see that their intellectual inferiors had joined the orcs to raze the ivory towers of Baggins University and Bree Poly and then rushed to send a late response to the QS opinion survey. But QS, to their credit, have taken steps to deal with that sort of thing by averaging out survey responses over a period of five years.

European and American universities have been complaining for a long time that they do not get enough money from the state and that their performance in the global rankings is undermined because they do not get enough international students or researchers. That is a bit more plausible. After all, income does account for three separate indicators in the Times Higher Education (THE) world rankings so reduced income would obviously cause universities to fall a bit. The scandal over Trinity College Dublin’s botched rankings data submission showed precisely how much a given increase in reported total income (with research and industry income in a constant proportion) means for the THE world rankings. International metrics account for 10% of the QS rankings and 7.5% of the THE world rankings. Whether a decline in income or the number of international students has a direct effect or indeed any effect at all on research output or the quality of teaching is quite another matter.

The problem with claims like this is that the QS and THE rankings are very blunt instruments that should not be used to make year by year analyses or to influence government or university policy. There have been several changes in methodology, there are fluctuations in the distribution of survey responses by region and subject and the average scores for indicators may go up and down as the number of participants changes. All of these mean that it is very unwise to make extravagant assertions about university quality based on what happens in those rankings.

Before making any claim based on ranking changes it would be a good idea to wait a few years until the impact of any methodological change has passed through the system

Another variation in this genre is the recent claim in the Daily Telegraph that “British universities are slipping down the world rankings, with experts blaming the decline on pressure to admit more disadvantaged students.”

Among the experts is Alan Smithers of the University of Buckingham who is reported as saying “universities are no longer free to take their own decisions and recruit the most talented students which would ensure top positions in league tables”.

There is certainly good evidence that British university courses are becoming much less rigorous. Every year reports come in about declining standards everywhere. The latest is the proposal at Oxford to allow students to do take home instead of timed exams.

But it is unlikely that this could show up in the QS or THE rankings. None of the global rankings has a metric that measures the attributes of graduates except perhaps the QS employers survey. It is probable that a decline in the cognitive skills of admitted undergraduate students would eventually trickle up to the qualities of research students and then to the output and quality of research but that is not something that could happen in a single year especially when there is so much noise generated by methodological changes.

The cold reality is that university rankings can tell us some things about universities and how they change over perhaps half a decade and some metrics are better than others but it is an exercise in futility to use overall rankings or indicators subject to methodological tweaking to argue about how political or economic changes are impacting western universities.

The latest improbable claim about rankings is that Oxford’s achieving parity with Cambridge in the THE reputation rankings was the result of  a positive image created by appointing its first female Vice Chancellor.

Phil Baty, THE’s editor, is reported as saying that ‘Oxford University’s move to appoint its first female Vice Chancellor sent a “symbolic” wave around the world which created a positive image for the institution among academics.’

There is a bit of a problem here. Louise Richardson was appointed Vice -Chancellor in January 2016. The polling for the 2016 THE reputation rankings took place between January and March 2016. One would expect that if the appointment of Richardson had any effect on academic opinion at all then it would be in those months. It certainly seems more likely than an impact that was delayed for more than a year. If the appointment did affect the reputation rankings then it was apparently a negative one for Oxford’s score fell massively from 80.4 in 2015 to 69.1 in 2016 (compared to 100 for Harvard in both years). 

So, did Oxford suffer in 2016 because spiteful curmudgeons were infuriated by an upstart intruding into the dreaming spires?

The collapse of Oxford in the 2016 reputation rankings and its slight recovery in 2017 almost certainly had nothing to do with the new Vice-Chancellor.

Take a look at the table below. Oxford’s reputation score tracks the percentage of THE survey responses from the arts and humanities. It goes up when there are more respondents from those subjects and goes down when there are fewer. This is the case for British universities in general and also for Cambridge except for this year.

The general trend since 2011 has been for the gap between Cambridge and Oxford to fall steadily and that trend happened before Oxford acquired a new Vice-Chancellor although it accelerated and finally erased the gap this year.

What is unusual about this year’s reputation ranking is not that Oxford recovered as the number of arts and humanities respondents increased but that Cambridge continued to fall.

I wonder if it has something to do with Cambridge’s “disastrous” performance in the THE research impact (citations) indicator in recent years.  In the 2014-15 world rankings Cambridge was 28^th behind places like Federico Santa Maria Technical University and Bogazici University. In 2015-16 it was 27^th behind St Petersburg Polytechnic University. But a greater humiliation came in the 2016-17 rankings. Cambridge fell to 31^st in the world for research impact. Even worse it was well behind Anglia Ruskin University, a former art school. For research impact Cambridge University wasn’t the best university in Europe or England. It wasn’t even the best in Cambridge, at least if you trusted the sophisticated THE rankings.

Rankings are not entirely worthless and if they did not exist no doubt they would somehow be invented. But it is doing nobody any good to use them to promote the special interests of university bureaucrats and insecure senior academics.

Table: Scores in THE reputation rankings

Year	Oxford	Cambridge	Gap	% responses arts and humanities
2011	68.6	80.7	12.1	--
2012	71.2	80.7	9.5	7%
2013	73.0	81.3	8.3	10.5%
2014	67.8	74.3	6.5	9%
2015	80.4	84.3	3.9	16%
2016	67.6	72.2	4.6	9%
2017	69.1	69.1	0	12.5%

Comparing the THE and QS Academic Reputation Surveys

Times Higher Education (THE) has just published its 2017 reputation rankings which include 100 universities. These are based on a survey distributed between January and March of this year and will be included, after standardisation, in the 2017-18 (or 2018) World University Rankings scheduled for publication in a few months. In the forthcoming world rankings the reputation survey will be divided into two metrics in the research and teaching indicator groups, with a combined weighting of 33 percent. The survey asked about research and postgraduate teaching but since the correlation between these two questions is very high there is effectively only one indicator.

The QS world rankings released last week included scores derived from two surveys, one of academics with a 40% weighting and one of employers with 10%. The academic survey was concerned only with research.

The methodology of the THE survey is relatively simple. The respondents are drawn from the database of researchers with publications in Scopus indexed journals, in other words those who get to be listed as corresponding author. THE claims that this makes them experienced senior researchers although in many parts of the world being a member or leader of a research team often has more to do with politics than merit.

In contrast, the QS methodology has changed quite a lot over the last few years. It began with scouring the mailing lists of World Scientific, a Singapore based academic publisher with links to Imperial College London, then adding various other channels including lists supplied by institutions and sign up facilities for potential respondents. The result is a survey that appears more inclusive than THE's with more respondents from outside the elite but one whose validity may be rather suspect.

The THE ranking found that there were six super-brand universities that stood out from everyone else, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley. There was a big gap between Berkeley and number seven Princeton and then the long smooth slope continues. 

After that, the ranking is dominated by English speaking universities, with the USA contributing 42, the UK 10, Canada 3 and Australia 3.  East Asia and the Chinese diaspora (Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore) are fairly well represented, while South and Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa are absent.

For any survey a great deal depends on how the forms are distributed. Last year, the THE survey had a lot more responses from the social sciences, including economics and business studies, and fewer from the arts and the humanities, and that contributed to some Asian universities rising and some British ones falling.

Such falls are typically attributed in the education establishment media to anxiety about the looming horrors of Brexit, the vicious snatching of research funds and the rising tide of hostility to international students.

This year British Universities did a bit better in the THE reputation ranking this year with five going up, three staying put and three going down. No doubt we will soon hear about the invigorating effects of Brexit and the benefits of austerity.  Perhaps also it might have something to do with the number of survey responses from the arts and humanities going up from  9% to 12.5%, something that would surely benefit UK universities.

The QS reputation indicator has the same universities in the top six but not in quite the same order: Cambridge, fourth in THE, is second in the QS indicator. After that it starts looking very different. Number seven is the University of Tokyo, which THE puts in 11th place for  academic reputation. Other Asian universities do much better in the QS indicator. The National University of Singapore is 11th ( 27th in THE) Nanyang Technological University  Singapore is 50th (THE 81-90 band), Peking University is 14th (THE 17h) Chulalongkorn University Thailand is 99th (not in the THE top 100).

It is noticeable that Latin American universities such as  the University of Sao Paulo, the University of Buenos Aires and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile get a higher placing in the QS indicator than they do in the THE ranking as do some Southern European universities such as Barcelona, Sapienza and Bologna.

The THE reputation ranking gives us a snapshot of the current views of the world's academic elite and probably underestimates the rising universities of Greater China and Korea. QS cast their nets further and have probably caught a few of tomorrow's world class institutions although I suspect that the Latin American high fliers, apart from Sao Paulo, are very overrated.

UTAR and the Times Higher Education Asian University Rankings

Recently, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), a private Malaysian university, welcomed what appeared to be an outstanding performance in the Times Higher Education (THE) Asian Universities Rankings, followed by a good score in the magazine’s Young University Rankings. This has been interpreted as a remarkable achievement not just for UTAR but also for Malaysian higher education in general.

In the Asian rankings, UTAR is ranked in the top 120 and second in Malaysia behind Universiti Malaya (UM) and ahead of the major research universities, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Putra Malaysia.

This is sharp contrast to other rankings. There is a research based ranking published by Middle East Technical University that puts UTAR 12^th in Malaysia and 589^th in Asia. The Webometrics ranking, which is mainly web based with one research indicator, has it 17^th in Malaysia and 651^st in Asia.

The QS rankings, known to be kind to South East Asian universities, puts UTAR in the 251-300 band for Asia and 14^th= in Malaysia behind places like Taylor’s University and Multi Media University and in the same band as Universiti Malaysia Perlis and Universiti Malaysia Terengganu. UTAR does not appear in the Shanghai rankings or the Russian Round University Rankings.

Clearly, THE is the odd man out among rankings in its assessment of UTAR. I suspect that if challenged a spokesperson for THE might say that this is because they measure things other than research. That is very debatable. Bahram Bekhradnia of the Higher Education Policy Institute has argued in a widely-cited report that these rankings are of little value because they are almost entirely research-orientated.

In fact, UTAR did not perform so well in the THE Asian rankings because of teaching, internationalisation or links with industry. It did not even do well in research. It did well because of an “outstanding” score for research impact and it got that score because of the combination of a single obviously talented researcher with a technically defective methodology.

Just take a look at UTAR’s scores for the various components in the THE Asian rankings. For Research UTAR got a very low score of 9.6, the lowest of the nine Malaysian universities featured in these rankings (100 represents the top score in all the indicators).

For Teaching it has a score of 15.9, also the lowest of the ranked Malaysian universities.

For International Orientation, it got a score of 33.2. This was not quite the worst in Malaysia. Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), which does not admit non– bumiputra Malaysians, let alone international students, did worse.

For Industry Income UTAR’s score was 32.9, again surpassed by every Malaysian university except UiTM.

So how on earth did UTAR manage to get into the top 120 in Asia and second in Malaysia?

The answer is that it got an “excellent” score of 56.7 for Research Impact, measured by field-normalised citations, higher than every other Malaysian university, including UM, in these rankings.

That score is also higher than several major international research universities such as National Taiwan University, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Kyoto University and Tel Aviv University. That alone should make the research impact score very suspicious. Also, compare the score with the low score for research which combines three metrics, research reputation, research income and publications. Somehow UTAR has managed to have a huge impact on the research world even though it receives little money for research, does not have much of a reputation for research, and does not publish very much.

The THE research impact (citations) indicator is very problematical in several ways. It regularly produces utterly absurd results such as Alexandria University in Egypt in fourth place for research impact in the world in 2010 and St George’s, University of London (a medical school), in first place last year, or Anglia Ruskin University, a former art school, equal to Oxford and well ahead of Cambridge University.

In addition, to flog a horse that should have decomposed by now, Veltech University in Chennai, India, according to THE has biggest research impact in Asia and perhaps, if it qualified for the World Rankings, in the world.  This was done by massive self-citation by exactly one researcher and a little bit of help from a few friends.

Second in Asia for research, THE would have us believe, is King Abdulaziz University of Jeddah which has been on  recruiting spree of adjunct faculty whose duties might include visiting the university but certainly do require putting its name as secondary affiliation in research papers.

To rely on the THE rankings as a measure of excellence is unwise. There were methodological changes in 2011, 2015 and 2016, which have contributed to universities moving up or down many places even if there has been no objective change. Middle East Technical University in Ankara, for example, fell from 85^th place in 2014-15 to the 501-600 band in 2015-6 and then to the 601-800 band in 2016-17. Furthermore, adding new universities means that the average scores from which the final scores are calculated are likely to fluctuate.

In addition, THE has been known to recalibrate the weight given to its indicators in their regional rankings and this has sometimes worked to the advantage of whoever is the host of THE’s latest exciting and prestigious summit. In 2016, THE’s Asian rankings featured an increased weight for research income from industry and a reduced one for teaching and research reputation. This was to the disadvantage of Japan and to the benefit of Hong Kong where the Asian summit was held.

So, is UTAR really more influential among international researchers than Kyoto University or the National Taiwan University?

What actually happened to UTAR is that it has an outstanding medical researcher who is involved in a massive international medical project with hundreds of collaborators from hundreds of institutions that produces papers that have been cited hundreds of times and will in the next few years be cited thousands of times. One of these papers had, by my count, 720 contributors from 470 universities and research centres and has so far received 1,036 citations, 695 in 2016 alone.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with such projects but it is ridiculous to treat every one of those 720 contributors as though they were the sole author of the paper with credit for all the citations, which is what THE does. This could have been avoided simply by using fractional counting and dividing the number of citations by the number of authors or number of affiliating institutions. This is an option available in the Leiden Ranking, which is the most technically expert of the various rankings. THE already does this for publications with over 1,000 contributors but that is obviously not enough.

I would not go as far as Bahram Bekhradnia and other higher education experts and suggest that universities should ignore rankings altogether. But if THE are going to continue to peddle such a questionable product then Malaysian universities would be well advised to keep their distance. There are now several other rankings on the marking that could be used for benchmarking and marketing.

It is not a good idea for UTAR to celebrate its achievement in the THE rankings. It is quite possible that the researcher concerned will one day go elsewhere or that THE will tweak its methodology again. If either happens the university will suffer from a precipitous fall in the rankings along with a decline in its public esteem. UTAR and other Malaysian universities would be wise to treat the THE rankings with a great deal of caution and scepticism.

A new Super-University for Ireland?

University rankings have become extremely influential over the last few years. This is not entirely a bad thing. The initial publication of the Shanghai rankings in 2003, for example, exposed the pretensions of many European universities revealing just how far behind they had fallen in scientific research.  It also showed China how far it had to go to achieve scientific parity with the West.

Unfortunately, rankings have also had malign effects. The THE and QS world rankings have acquired a great deal of respect, trust, even reverence that may not be entirely deserved. Both introduced significant methodological changes in 2015 and THE has made further changes in 2016 and the consequence of this is that there have been some remarkable rises and falls within the rankings that have had a lot of publicity but have little to do with any real change in quality.

In addition, both QS and THE have increased the number of ranked universities which can affect the mean score for indicators from which the processed scores given to the public are derived. Both have surveys that can be biased and subjective. Both are unbalanced: QS with a 50 % weighting for academic and employer surveys and THE with field and year normalised citations plus a partial regional modification with an official weighting of 30% (the modification means that everybody except the top scorer gets a bonus for citations). The remarkable rise of Anglia Ruskin University to parity with Oxford and Princeton in this year’s THE research impact (citations) indicator and the high placing of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and the National University of Colombia in QS’s employers survey are evidence that these rankings continue to be implausible and unstable. To make higher education policy dependent on their fluctuations is very unwise.

This is particularly true of the two leading Irish universities, Trinity College Dublin (TCD)  and University College Dublin (UCD), which have in fact been advancing in the Round University Rankings produced by a Russian organisation and ShanghaiRanking’s Academic Ranking of World Universities. These two global rankings have methodologies that are generally stable and transparent.

I pointed out in 2015 that TCD had been steadily rising in the Shanghai ARWU  since 2004, especially in the Publications indicator (papers in the Science Citation Index - Expanded and the Social Science Citation Index) and PCP (productivity per capita, that is the combined indicator scores divided by the number of faculty). This year, to repeat an earlier post, TCD’s publication score again went up very slightly from 31 to 31.1 (27.1 in 2004) and the PCP quite significantly from 19 to 20.8 (13.9 in 2004), compared to top scores of 100 for Harvard and Caltech respectively.

UCD has also continued to do well in the Shanghai rankings with the publications score rising this year from 34.1 to 34.2 (27.3 in 2004) and PCP from 18.0 to 18.1 (8.1 in 2014).

The Shanghai rankings are, of course, famous for not counting the arts and humanities and not trying to measure anything related to teaching. The RUR rankings from Russia are based on Thomson Reuters data, also used by THE until two years ago and they do include publications in the humanities and teaching-related metrics. They have 12 out of the 13 indicators in the THE World University Rankings, plus eight others, but with a sensible weighting, for example 8% instead of 30% for field normalised citations.

The RUR rankings show that TCD rose from 174th overall in 2010 to 102nd in 2016. (193rd to 67th for research). UCD rose from 213th overall to 195th (157th to 69th for research) although some Irish universities such as NUI Galway, NUI Maynooth, University College Cork, and Dublin City University have fallen.

It is thoroughly disingenuous for Irish academics to claim that academic standards are declining because of a lack of funds. Perhaps they will do so in the future. But so far everything suggests that the two leading Irish universities are making steady progress especially in research.

The fall of UCD in this year’s THE rankings this year and TCD’s fall in 2015 and the fall of both in the QS rankings mean very little. When there are such large methodological changes it is pointless to discuss how to improve in the rankings. Methodological changes can be made and unmade and universities made and unmade as the Middle East Technical University found in 2015 when it fell from 85th place in the THE world rankings to below 501^st.

The Irish Times of November 8th  had an article by Philip O’Kane that proposed that Irish universities should combine in some ways to boost their position in the global rankings.

He suggested that:

“The only feasible course of action for Ireland to avert continued sinking in the world rankings is to create a new “International University of Ireland”.

This could be a world-class research university that consists exclusively of the internationally-visible parts of all our existing institutions, and to do so at marginal cost using joint academic appointments, joint facilities and joint student registration, in a highly flexible and dynamic manner.

Those parts that are not internationally visible would be excluded from this International University of Ireland.”

It sounds like he is proposing that universities maintain their separate identity for some things but present a united front for international matters. This was an idea that was proposed in India a while ago but was quickly shot down by Phil Baty of THE. It is most unlikely that universities could separate data for faculty, students, and income, and publications of their international bits and send the data to the rankers.

The idea of a full merger is more practical but could be pointless or even counter-productive. In 2012 a group of experts, headed by European Commissioner Frans  Van Vught, suggested that UCD and TCD be merged to become a single world class university.

The ironic thing about this idea is that a merger would help with the Shanghai rankings that university bosses are studiously pretending do not exist but would be of little or no use with the rankings that the bureaucrats and politicians do care about.

The Shanghai rankings are known for being as much about quantity as quality. A merger of TCD and UCD would produce a significant gain for the university by combining the number of publications, papers in Nature and Science, and highly cited researchers. It would do no good for Nobel and Fields awards since Trinity has two now and UCD none so the new institution would still only have two (ShanghaiRanking does not count Peace and Literature). Overall, it is likely that the new Irish super-university would rise about a dozen places in the Shanghai rankings, perhaps even getting into the top 150 (TCD is currently 162nd).

But it would probably not help with the rankings that university heads are so excited about. Many of the indicators in the QS and THE rankings are scaled in some way. You might get more citations by adding together those of TCD and UCD, for instance, but QS divide them by number of faculty which would also be combined if there was a merger. You could combine the incomes of TCD and UCD but then the combined income would be divided by the combined staff numbers.

The only place where a merger would be of any point is the survey criteria, 50% in QS and 33% in THE but the problem here is that the reputation of a new University of Dublin or Ireland or whatever it is called is likely to be inferior to that of TCD and UCD for some years to come. There are places where merging universities is a sensible way of pooling the strengths of a multitude of small specialist schools and research centres, for example France and Russia. But for Ireland, there is little point if the idea is to get ahead in the QS and THE  rankings.

It would make more sense for Irish universities to focus on the Shanghai rankings where, if present trends continue, TCD will catch up with Harvard in about 240 years although by then the peaks of the intellectual world will probably be in Seoul, Shanghai, Moscow, Warsaw and Tallinn. 

Will North Korea Engage with the Rankings?

Kim Jong-un has declared that Kim Il-sung University must become a world-class institution. No doubt there will be chuckles at Oxford,  Anglia Ruskin University, the University of Iceland and the Free University of Bozen - Bolzano but it could be surprisingly easy if being world class means getting a high place in the rankings. After all, there are now quite a few places appearing in the various global and regional tables that would have been just as surprising just a few years ago.

First, I should mention that there already is a ranking in which Kim Il-sung University is listed: a ranking of international influence as measured by Google's ranking of search results where the institution is 254th.

Here is my plan for North Korea to become world class in just a few years.

1. Offer adjunct professorships to 150 researchers and ask them to  put the university as a secondary affiliation. Maybe they can come and visit Pyongyang sometimes but that is not really necessary. In a little while they will be producing 150 papers or more a year with the university name on, eventually one thousand over a five year period, which will meet the threshold for inclusion in the THE world rankings.

2. Make sure that one or two of those adjunct professors are involved in multi-author, multi-cited projects (but make sure below 1,000 authors) with multiple citations. Medicine is probably a better bet than physics at the moment. This will get a good score in the THE citations indicator.

3. Make sure that research funds to the university go through something with the word industry in it. That way the university will go to the top of the THE Industry Income: Innovation indicator.

4. Don't forget the other rankings. Give the university a boost in the QS world rankings by drafting lots of research assistants who will count in the the student faculty ratio indicator.

5.   Start a branch campus somewhere and get a high score in the international indicators that nearly everybody has nowadays. If the branch is in the USA go for Princeton Review's top party school. 

6. Send a few hundred closely supervised graduate students abroad and tell them they know what to do for the QS reputation survey. When they come back as faculty with a co-authored article or two tell them they know what to do for the THE survey.

7. When Kim Il-sung University is a rising star of the university world, try hosting a summit to rise even higher. Better make sure that hotel is finished though.

The THE World University Rankings: Arguably the Most Amusing League Table in the World

If ever somebody does get round to doing a ranking of university rankings and if entertainment value is an indicator the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings (WUR) stand a good chance of being at the top.

The latest global rankings contain many items that academics would be advised not to read in public places lest they embarrass the family by sniggering to themselves in Starbucks or Nandos.

THE would, for example, have us believe that St. George's, University of London is the top university in the world for research impact as measured by citations. This institution specialises in medicine, biomedical science and healthcare sciences. It does not do research in the physical sciences, the social sciences, or the arts and humanities and makes no claim that it does. To suggest that it is the best in the world across the range of scientific and academic research is ridiculous.

There are several other universities with scores for citations that are disproportionately higher than their research scores, a sure sign that the THE citations indicator is generating absurdity.  They include Brandeis, the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Clark University, King Abdulaziz University, Anglia Ruskin University, the University of Iceland, and Orebro University, Sweden.

In some cases, it is obvious what has happened. King Abdulaziz University has been gaming the rankings by recruiting large numbers of adjunct faculty whose main function appears to be listing the university as as a secondary affiliation in order to collect a share of the credit for publications and citations. The Shanghai rankers have stopped counting secondary affiliations for their highly cited researchers indicator but KAU is still racking up the points in other indicators and other rankings.

The contention that Anglia Ruskin University is tenth in the world  for research impact, equal to Oxford, Princeton, and UC Santa Barbara, and just above the University of Chicago, will no doubt be met with donnish smirks at the high tables of that other place in Cambridge, 31st for citations, although there will probably be less amusement about Oxford being crowned best university in the world.

Anglia Ruskin 's output of research is not very high, about a thirtieth of Chicago's according to the Web of Science Core Collection. Its faculty does, however, include one Professor who is a frequent contributor to global medical studies with a large number of authors, although never more than a thousand, and hundreds of citations a year. Single-handedly he has propelled the university into the research stratosphere since the rest of the university has been generating few citations (there's nothing wrong with that: it's not that sort of place) and so the number of papers by which the normalised citations are divided is very low.

The THE citations methodology is badly flawed. That university heads give any credence to rankings that include such ludicrous results is sad testimony to the decadence of the modern academy.

There are also many universities that have moved up or down by  a disproportionate number of places. These include:

Peking University rising from 42nd  to 29th
University of  Maryland at College Park rising from 117th to 67th.
Purdue University rising from 113th to 70th.
Chinese  University of Hong Kong rising from 138th  to 76th.
RWTH Aachen rising from 110th to 78th
Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology rising from  148th to 89th


Vanderbilt University falling from 87th to108th
University of Copenhagen falling from 82nd to 120th
Scuola Normale Pisa falling from 112nd to 137th
University of Cape Town falling from 120th to 148th
Royal Holloway, University of London falling from 129th to173rd
Lomonosov Moscow State University falling from 161st to 188th.


The point cannot be stressed too clearly that universities are large and complex organisations. They do not in 12 months or less, short of major restructuring, change sufficiently to produce movements such as these. The only way that such instability could occur is through entry into the rankings of universities with attributes different from the established ones thus changing the means from which standardised scores are derived or significant methodological changes.

There have in fact been significant changes to the methodology this year although perhaps not as substantial as 2015. First, books and book chapters are included in the count of publications and citations, an innovation pioneered by the US News in their Best Global Universities. Almost certainly this has helped English speaking universities with a comparative advantage in the humanities and social sciences although THE's practice of bundling indicators together makes it impossible to say exactly how much. It would also work to the disadvantage of institutions such as Caltech that are comparatively less strong in the arts and humanities.

Second, THE have used a modest version of fractional counting for papers with more than a thousand authors. Last year they were not counted at all. This means that universities that have participated in mega-papers such as those associated with the Large Hadron Collider will get some credit for citations of those papers although not as much as they did in 2014 and before. This has almost certainly helped a number of Asian universities that have participated in such projects but have a generally modest research output. It might have benefitted some universities in California such as UC Berkeley.

Third, THE have combined the results of the academic reputation survey conducted earlier this year with that used in the 2015-16 rankings. Averaging reputation surveys is a sensible idea, already adopted by QS and US News in their global rankings, but one that THE has avoided until now.

This year's survey saw a very large reduction in the number of responses from researchers in the arts and humanities and a very large increase, for reasons unexplained, in the number of responses from business studies and the social sciences, separated now but combined in 2015.

Had the responses for 2016 alone been counted there might have been serious consequences for UK universities, relatively strong in the humanities, and a boost for East Asian universities, relatively strong in business studies. Combining the two surveys would have limited the damage to British universities and slowed down the rise of Asia to media-acceptable proportions.

One possible consequence of these changes is that UC Berkeley, eighth in 2014-15 and thirteenth in 2015-16, is now, as predicted here,  back in the top ten. Berkeley is host for the forthcoming THE world summit although that is no doubt entirely coincidental.

The overall top place has been taken by Oxford to the great joy of the vice-chancellor who is said to be "thrilled" by the news.

I do not want to be unfair to Oxford but the idea that it is superior to Harvard, Princeton, Caltech or MIT is nonsense. Its strong performance in the THE WUR is in large measure due to the over- emphasis in these tables on reputation, income and a very flawed citations indicator. Its rise to first place over Caltech is almost certainly a result of this year's methodological changes.

Let's look at Oxford's standing in other rankings. The Round University Ranking (RUR) uses Thomson Reuters data just like THE did until two years ago. It has 12 of the indicators employed by THE and eight additional ones.

Overall Oxford was 10th, up from 17th in 2010. In the teaching group of five indicators Oxford is in 28th place. For specific indicators in that group the best performance was teaching reputation (6th) and the worst academic staff per bachelor degrees (203rd).

In Research it was 20th. Places ranged from 6th for research reputation to 206th for doctoral degrees per admitted PhD. It was 5th for International Diversity and 12th for Financial Sustainability

The Shanghai ARWU rankings have Oxford in 7th place and Webometrics in 10th (9th for Google Scholar Citations).

THE is said to be trusted by the great and the good of the academic world. The latest example is the Norwegian government including performance in the THE WUR as a criterion for overseas study grants. That trust seems largely misplaced. When the vice-chancellor of Oxford University is thrilled by a ranking that puts the university on a par for research impact with Anglia Ruskin then one really wonders about the quality of university leadership.

To conclude my latest exercise in malice and cynicism, (thank you ROARS) here is a game to amuse international academics .

Ask your friends which university in their country is the leader for research impact and then tell them who THE thinks it is.

Here are THE's research champions, according to the citations indicator:

Argentina: National University of the South
Australia: Charles Darwin University
Brazil: Universidade Federal do ABC (ABC refers to its location, not the courses offered)
Canada: University of British Columbia
China: University of Science and Technology of China
France: Paris Diderot Univerity: Paris 7
Germany: Ulm University
Ireland: Royal College of Surgeons
Japan: Toyota Technological Institute
Italy: Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Russia: ITMO University
Turkey: Atilim University
United Kingdom: St George's, University of London.