(10 February 2016) Times Higher Education has released a list of top 25 universities over 400 years old in honor of the death of William Shakespeare. It uses the data from the 2015-2016 THE World University Rankings. The top two are also the two oldest and 2 and 4 in the THE World rankings, Oxford (1096) and Cambridge (1209). Only one Asian university, Sungkyunkwan (1537) of South Korea made the list
Since age was a factor in the Wikipedia–based rankings discussed in the newly released Ruth’s Rankings 17, I did a quick scan to see how this list matched up by comparing the new THE ranking with Wikipedia’s WRWU and Wikiometrics and ARWU
Only the WRWU rankings provide age, Therefore, I used the THE world ranking for the 25th university, which is 185, as one comparison point and total numbers on the list as a second point. Note that WPRWU has over 1,000 universities, Wikiometrics 389 and the ARWU 500.
Wikipedia (Larges) WPRWU – 16 from 1 – 148 and a total of 22; 10 are better than THE
Wikiometrics (Katz) – 17 from 4 – 168 and a total of 20; 7 are better than THE
ARWU – 14 ranked from 5 to 101-150 and a total of 23; 7 are better than THE
The article does not list how many of the 800 THE universities are over 400. WPRWU includes 84 universities founded before 1616.
The announcement of the top ancient universities is here.
A list of Ruth’s Rankings and News Updates is here.
Ruth’s Rankings News Flash! is written by Ruth A. Pagell, currently an adjunct faculty [teaching] in the Library and Information Science Program at the University of Hawaii. Before joining UH, she was the founding librarian of the Li Ka Shing Library at Singapore Management University. She has written and spoken extensively on various aspects of librarianship, including contributing articles to ACCESS – orcid.org/0000-0003-3238-9674.
