(5 April 2017) The latest edition of U-Multirank includes 1,500 universities. Bibliometric data come from CWTS (Centre for Science and Technology Studies), which provides the data for Leiden rankings. Of the over 1,200 universities that have bibliometric data, only 400 have complete data on the other indicators. A handful of North American schools share data and the response rate is also low from the major players in Asia, such as China, Japan and Korea.
In trying to be fair I look at U-Multirank from an undergraduate student’s perspective. I selected a subject with which I am familiar, “Business Studies” and sorted on overall learning experience. The top school, which is in Portugal, is not accredited by EQUIS the European accrediting body. Fewer than half the schools have submitted data. I then tried “computer science” and schools that spend a medium or large amount on teaching. The top school was Russian and the second from Kazakhstan and the majority of universities did not submit data.
Finally, I checked the Readymade table, which is now only for research from PhD granting institutions, to see the top Asian universities. U-Multirank has taken a step backward since the table comes out as a PDF and I can no longer select a region or a country. Check here for its methodology.
See Table 1 for the top 10 universities in the world, Asia-Oceana and Eastern Asia and the top five for China and Japan. Ranking is based on the sorted column, in this case citation rate. Sorting on different columns produces different rankings.
The conclusions that I reached in Ruth’s Rankings 12 have not changed and it still is of limited use for North America and Asia. In trying to think of something positive to say about U-Multirank, it does have a metric for library facilities.
[pdf-embedder url=”https://librarylearningspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/U-Multirank-rankings.pdf”]
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.
