(10 July 2017) Two new rankings appeared in the past couple of weeks. One is worth looking at while the other is just a rehash of existing data.
ARWU Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2017 (GRAS)
- Wuhan University is ranked number one in Remote Sensing
- HK Polytechnic is number one in Hospitality & Tourism Management
- Singapore Management University top in International Collaboration in Business Administration
ARWU, Academic Ranking of Global Universities released a new expanded Global Ranking of Academic Subjects including 52 subjects with a list of number ones in each category. Size-dependent indicators include the number of publications, number of staff winning awards in an academic subject and number of papers published in top journals. Size-independent indicators include CNCI, Category Normalized Citations Indicators, and percent of internationally collaborated papers. The Engineering field dominates the list with 22 subjects followed by Social Sciences with 14, including Library and Information Science, Medical and Natural Sciences with six each and Life Sciences with five. The U.S. leads with 32 number one positions. In Asia-Pacific, China takes seven number one spots, all in engineering, followed by Singapore with two in Engineering and Hong Kong with one in Social Sciences.
Institutions that have ignored the ARWU World Rankings but who are strong in specialized subjects should look at this. Examples of institutions that appear in the new ARWU subject rankings but not in the ARWU world rankings include Australia’s Southern Cross University and South Korea’s Sejong University, ranked 22 and 24 respectively in Hospitality and Tourism Management, Japan’s Niigata in the top 75 in Dentistry, New Zealand’s Massey in Veterinary Sciences, China’s Hohai University in Water Resources, Thailand’s Kasetsart University in the top 400 out of 500 in Agricultural Sciences and Singapore Management University, ranked 76 out of a pool of 200 in Business Administration. SMU also leads the Business Administration subject with the top score for international collaboration. For a more in-depth analysis, click here.
THE 2017 Best Universities in the Asia-Pacific Rankings
This ranking should be ignored as it is just another reworking of the 2016-2017 World University Rankings. The order of universities is similar to the Asian University Ranking published in March (see March News Flash) as shown in Table 1. That included Asia from the Mediterranean to the Pacific while the “new” ranking adds Australia and New Zealand and excludes any country that does not border the Pacific.
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The weighting of indicators for the Asian and Asia -Pacific rankings are the same, with a slight reworking from the 2016-2017 World Rankings (Table 2). This new ranking offer nothing new, even for rankings junkies.
[pdf-embedder url=”https://librarylearningspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Table-2-Methodologies.pdf”]
A list of Ruth’s Rankings and News Updates is here.
Ruth’s Rankings News Flash! is written by Ruth A. Pagell, emeritus faculty librarian at Emory University. After working at Emory she was the founding librarian of the Li Ka Shing Library at Singapore Management University and then adjunct faculty [teaching] in the Library and Information Science Program at the University of Hawaii. She has written and spoken extensively on various aspects of librarianship, including contributing articles to ACCESS – orcid.org/0000-0003-3238-9674.
