IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v92y2012i1d10.1007_s11192-012-0724-7.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A comparative study on world university rankings: a bibliometric survey

Author

Listed:
  • Kuang-hua Chen

    (National Taiwan University)

  • Pei-yu Liao

    (National Taiwan University)

Abstract

Recently there are many organizations conducting projects on ranking world universities from different perspectives. These ranking activities have made impacts and caused controversy. This study does not favor using bibliometric indicators to evaluate universities’ performances, but not against the idea either. We regard these ranking activities as important phenomena and aim to investigate correlation of different ranking systems taking bibliometric approach. Four research questions are discussed: (1) the inter-correlation among different ranking systems; (2) the intra-correlation within ranking systems; (3) the correlation of indicators across ranking systems; and (4) the impact of different citation indexes on rankings. The preliminary results show that 55 % of top 200 universities are covered in all ranking systems. The rankings of ARWU and PRSPWU show stronger correlation. With inclusion of another ranking, WRWU (2009–2010), these rankings tend to converge. In addition, intra-correlation is significant and this means that it is possible to find out some ranking indicators with high degree of discriminativeness or representativeness. Finally, it is found that there is no significant impact of using different citation indexes on the ranking results for top 200 universities.

Suggested Citation

  • Kuang-hua Chen & Pei-yu Liao, 2012. "A comparative study on world university rankings: a bibliometric survey," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 92(1), pages 89-103, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:92:y:2012:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-012-0724-7
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-012-0724-7
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-012-0724-7
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-012-0724-7?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jean-Charles Billaut & Denis Bouyssou & Philippe Vincke, 2009. "Should you believe in the Shanghai ranking? An MCDM view," Working Papers hal-00877050, HAL.
    2. Ross Williams, 1998. "Funding Australian Universities," Australian Economic Review, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, vol. 31(2), pages 148-156, June.
    3. Anthony F. J. van Raan, 2005. "Fatal attraction: Conceptual and methodological problems in the ranking of universities by bibliometric methods," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 62(1), pages 133-143, January.
    4. Fred L. Bookstein & Horst Seidler & Martin Fieder & Georg Winckler, 2010. "Too much noise in the Times Higher Education rankings," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 85(1), pages 295-299, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Teodoro Luque-Martínez & Salvador Barrio-García, 2016. "Constructing a synthetic indicator of research activity," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 108(3), pages 1049-1064, September.
    2. Bonaccorsi, Andrea & Cicero, Tindaro, 2016. "Nondeterministic ranking of university departments," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(1), pages 224-237.
    3. A. Ferrer-Sapena & E. Erdogan & E Jiménez-Fernández & E. A. Sánchez-Pérez & F. Peset, 2020. "Self-defined information indices: application to the case of university rankings," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(3), pages 2443-2456, September.
    4. F. Cugnata & G. Perucca & S. Salini, 2017. "Bayesian networks and the assessment of universities' value added," Journal of Applied Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 44(10), pages 1785-1806, July.
    5. Yuniol Alvarez-Betancourt & Miguel Garcia-Silvente, 2014. "An overview of iris recognition: a bibliometric analysis of the period 2000–2012," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(3), pages 2003-2033, December.
    6. Ibrahim Shehatta & Khalid Mahmood, 2016. "Correlation among top 100 universities in the major six global rankings: policy implications," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(2), pages 1231-1254, November.
    7. Maryam Moshtagh & Tahereh Jowkar & Maryam Yaghtin & Hajar Sotudeh, 2023. "The moderating effect of altmetrics on the correlations between single and multi-faceted university ranking systems: the case of THE and QS vs. Nature Index and Leiden," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(1), pages 761-781, January.
    8. Hira Khan & Khairul Anuar Mohammad Shah & Jamshed Khalid & Majed Ageel A Harnmal & Anees Janee Ali, 2020. "Globalization and University Rankings: Consequences and Prospects," International Journal of Higher Education, Sciedu Press, vol. 9(6), pages 190-190, December.
    9. Nabil Amara & Réjean Landry & Norrin Halilem, 2015. "What can university administrators do to increase the publication and citation scores of their faculty members?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 103(2), pages 489-530, May.
    10. Gul, Muhammet & Yucesan, Melih, 2022. "Performance evaluation of Turkish Universities by an integrated Bayesian BWM-TOPSIS model," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 80(C).
    11. Olcay, Gokcen Arkali & Bulu, Melih, 2017. "Is measuring the knowledge creation of universities possible?: A review of university rankings," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 153-160.
    12. Aldieri, Luigi & Kotsemir, Maxim & Vinci, Concetto Paolo, 2018. "The impact of research collaboration on academic performance: An empirical analysis for some European countries," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 13-30.
    13. Vicente Safón, 2013. "What do global university rankings really measure? The search for the X factor and the X entity," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 97(2), pages 223-244, November.
    14. Andrea Bonaccorsi & Cinzia Daraio, 2014. "Beyond university rankings ? Generating new indicators on European universities by linking data in open platforms," DIAG Technical Reports 2014-12, Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Universita' degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza".

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Daraio, Cinzia & Bonaccorsi, Andrea & Geuna, Aldo & Lepori, Benedetto & Bach, Laurent & Bogetoft, Peter & F. Cardoso, Margarida & Castro-Martinez, Elena & Crespi, Gustavo & de Lucio, Ignacio Fernandez, 2011. "The European university landscape: A micro characterization based on evidence from the Aquameth project," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 148-164, February.
    2. Saisana, Michaela & d'Hombres, Béatrice & Saltelli, Andrea, 2011. "Rickety numbers: Volatility of university rankings and policy implications," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 165-177, February.
    3. Varshavsky, Alexander & Komkina, Tatiana, 2011. "Analysis of two main university rankings," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 23(3), pages 57-78.
    4. Alan Peter Matthews, 2012. "South African universities in world rankings," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 92(3), pages 675-695, September.
    5. Vicente Safón, 2019. "Inter-ranking reputational effects: an analysis of the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE) reputational relationship," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(2), pages 897-915, November.
    6. Rabishankar Giri & Sabuj Kumar Chaudhuri, 2021. "Ranking journals through the lens of active visibility," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(3), pages 2189-2208, March.
    7. Domingo Docampo & Lawrence Cram, 2019. "Highly cited researchers: a moving target," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 118(3), pages 1011-1025, March.
    8. Mehdi Rhaiem & Nabil Amara, 2020. "Determinants of research efficiency in Canadian business schools: evidence from scholar-level data," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(1), pages 53-99, October.
    9. Daraio, Cinzia & Bonaccorsi, Andrea & Simar, Léopold, 2015. "Rankings and university performance: A conditional multidimensional approach," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 244(3), pages 918-930.
    10. Valadkhani, Abbas & Ville, Simon, 2008. "Identifying the Most Research Intensive Faculties of Business in Australia: A Multidimensional Approach," Economics Working Papers wp08-03, School of Economics, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia.
    11. Gennaro Guida, 2018. "Italian Economics Departments’ Scientific Research Performance: Comparison between VQR and ASN Methodologies," International Journal of Business and Management, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 13(9), pages 182-182, August.
    12. Anastasios Zopiatis & Antonis L. Theocharous & Panayiotis Constanti, 2015. "‘The past is prologue to the future’: an introspective view of hospitality and tourism research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(2), pages 1731-1753, February.
    13. Auranen, Otto & Nieminen, Mika, 2010. "University research funding and publication performance--An international comparison," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(6), pages 822-834, July.
    14. Ruimin Ma & Chaoqun Ni & Junping Qiu, 2008. "Scientific research competitiveness of world universities in computer science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 76(2), pages 245-260, August.
    15. Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo & Flavia Di Costa, 2011. "A national-scale cross-time analysis of university research performance," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 87(2), pages 399-413, May.
    16. Abramo, Giovanni & D’Angelo, Ciriaco Andrea, 2015. "Evaluating university research: Same performance indicator, different rankings," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 514-525.
    17. Anthony F. J. Raan, 2006. "Comparison of the Hirsch-index with standard bibliometric indicators and with peer judgment for 147 chemistry research groups," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 67(3), pages 491-502, June.
    18. Lipeng Fan & Yuefen Wang & Shengchun Ding & Binbin Qi, 2020. "Productivity trends and citation impact of different institutional collaboration patterns at the research units’ level," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(2), pages 1179-1196, November.
    19. Amanda H Goodall, 2005. "Should top universities be led by top researchers, and are they?," General Economics and Teaching 0510003, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    20. Joe Hirschberg & Jenny Lye & Martin Davies & Carol Johnston, 2011. "Measuring Student Experience: Relationships between Teaching Quality Instruments (TQI) and Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ)," Department of Economics - Working Papers Series 1134, The University of Melbourne.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:92:y:2012:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-012-0724-7. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.