(12 October 2016) Yet another ranking’s update offers another example of Chinese universities rising as Japanese universities continue to slide. In the first ranking in 2007 (HEEACT), there were nine Chinese universities and none in the top 200. In 2016, there are 53 Chinese universities with eleven in the top 200. During the same time frame, Japan started with 32 universities in 2007 slipping to 21 today, with seven in the original top 200 and six today (Figure 1).
[pdf-embedder url=”https://librarylearningspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Figure-1-News-Flash-October_NTUdocx.pdf”]
NTU selects its universities from a pool of over 4,000 institutions in Thomson’s ESI (Essential Science Indicators), WOS (Web of Science) and JCR (Journal Citation Reports.) The indicators used for the NTU Rankings only measure scholarly output. The ranking counts number of publications, citations, and highly cited papers and the h-index. Changes in methodology in 2016 are in response to changes in ESI. An example is using journal publication year instead of database year. 80% of the basic rankings are size dependent the reference ranking normalizes results by using an average number of articles and citations per full time faculty, the only metric modified by non-bibliometric data.
Table 1 includes the top 10 in the world for the current rankings (2016) 2015, the original 2007 ranking from HEEACT (Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan) and the normalized rankings by faculty size (Ref Rank). Eight of the top 10 are the same as the original top 10 due in part to a methodology that uses total numbers and also includes 11 years of data.
[pdf-embedder url=”https://librarylearningspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Table-1-World-Rank-20166docx.pdf”]
Asian rankings are more volatile. Only four of the top 10 Asian universities in 2008 are in the top 10 in 2016and three of today’s top ten were not even in the top 200 as shown in Table 2. Remember that we also warn our readers to look beyond the rank. While University of Tokyo has fallen eleven places its score has risen from 42 to 74.8.
[pdf-embedder url=”https://librarylearningspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Table-2_News-Flash-Asia-NTU.pdf”]
Stay tuned for the U.S. News Global Rankings which are due at the end of the month and a year-end recap of all the changes throughout the year in December.
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.
