Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Over to you
5 November 2009
When we published the 2009 rankings last month, there was a lively online debate about the methodology. Comments included:
- "The tables seem to be based mainly on people's perceptions, so the best-known universities are at the top."
- "This method favours universities of huge size, while there is nothing to prove that education is better in bigger institutions."
- "The number of reviewers involved in the peer-review survey should be well-represented globally."
- "The data collected should be made more transparent."
- "UCL and Imperial above UC Berkeley and Princeton? Give me a break."
- "This method favours big commercial universities with huge propaganda machines and lavish intellectual property offices."
- "Germany and France are doing most research in special institutions outside of the universities. Therefore, the ranking for France and Germany is nonsense."
- "International students should not be directly translated to an absolute measure of quality."
Help us develop our methodology. What makes a world-class university? What have we got wrong? What criteria would you use? Join the debate at http://tinyurl.com/yap542l.
Readers' comments
More and better data will not help unless 'quality' is one-dimensional. Otherwise there will still still be legitimate differences among those who weight the separate dimensions differently. There is a substantial literature on social measurement of which I hope Thomson Reuters are aware. Otherwise they will make fools of themselves - and you.
Change the citation score so that specialist universities are not hindered over large ones with medical schools and lots of science research
It is good to see that there is a re-assessment of the methodology used in developing the Times Higher Education’s annual World University Rankings. The past rankings have been a joke within most universities- I know we both groan and hoot when we see the annual fluctuations in the rankings of some institutions. A heavy weighting on comments by peers is such an unreliable source of data. In the absence of universally reliable indicators of teaching quality any credible ranking can only rely on research data - citations etc. The Shanghai Jia Tong rankings uses such data and it will be hard to see how the Times will be able to improve on this very much. So perhaps you should save yourselves the bother.
Take it easy folks!
Well said too!!!
It will take alot to undo all the damage the ranking exercises have done to scholarship. Little can be expected from more sophisticated methodologies since the same unsophisticated philosophy of selling magazines and newspapers will rule.