(19 May 2016) The beginning of May has been a busy time for university rankings. 18 May saw the release of the 2016 Leiden rankings. Times Higher Education (THE)’s World Reputation Rankings rolled out at the beginning of May. India publicized its new initiatives to fund and evaluate its universities and Thomson-Reuters announced collaboration with the Australian Research Council (ARC).
The 2016 Leiden rankings include 842 universities that have over 1,000 fractionally counted Web of Science Core publications published between 2011 and 2014, from 53 countries. The most important change for the casual user, is that the DEFAULT ranking is now fractionally counted publications (P). In order to create a comparable ranking with previous defaults, reorder by “PP (top 10%)”. Rockefeller University, which slipped out of last year’s rankings because it did not meet the publication minimum is back as number one .The number of all Asian institutions rose from 236 to 275 and Chinese institutions, including Hong Kong, from 90 to 114. Australia added one additional university, bringing the total to 24. New Zealand remained at 5. Table 1 shows the top ten world and Asian/Pacific universities based on publication and on publications in the top 10%.
While the number of universities has grown, the number of metrics available for online sorting has been shrinking. If you download the dataset, you can sort on over 25 different metrics. For more on the Leiden Rankings, see Ruth’s Rankings 8.
Leiden is also publicizing two new graphic capabilities, a bubble chart and a map, but not being a visual person, I could not see the value add.
THE (TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION) REPUTATION RANKINGS
The big university news on the BBC this month is the slip from second and third to fourth and fifth for Cambridge and Oxford in the THE 2016 Reputation Rankings. QS and U S News Global integrate reputation rankings into their composite scores. The drop is attributed to the rise in Asian universities. Although there is an increase in the number of Asia/Pacific universities in the top 100, none are in the top ten. Table 2 shows the top 10 in the world and all the Asia/Pacific entrants.
THOMSON REUTERS AND AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL.
Thomson Reuters announced that the Australian Research Council (see Ruth’s Rankings 18) will be using the Web of Science Core Collection data to improve its era and sector analysis. I wrote to ARC for clarification but I have received no response. Ruth’s Rankings 19 will cover more Australian data on a subject level.
INDIA’s HIGHER EDUCATION INITIATIVES
India announced the formation of a new Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA) to ensure that ten public and ten private institutions become world class teaching and research institutions This follows a new National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRA) from the Ministry of Human Resources. In April, it published the first national rankings of top 100 universities overall and the top100 in Engineering, Management and Pharmaceuticals. The indicators do not included bibliometrics. https://www.nirfindia.org/Home
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.
