09 May 2019

The IREG conference, with the theme ‘Rankings: A Challenge to Higher Education’ has opened at the University of Bologna (Alma Mater Studiorum Universita di Bologna). The conference began with an opening session that included Luiz C. Costa, President of the IREG Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence and Academic Vice Rector of IESB university, Brazil, Francesco Ubertini, Rector of the University of Bologna, and Gaetano Manfredi, Rector of the University of Naples.

Jaroslaw Gowin, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and Higher Education of Poland delivered a keynote speech: Rankings: a Challenge to Public Poicy? Reflection from Poland’s Perspective. In his speech Gowin remarked that current situation “creates the demand for verified and reliable information that reduces the complexity of a problem to its most relevant aspects” adding that “social expectations for rankings are clear –  rankings should provide trustworthy information allowing to dismiss alternatives that do not meet our criteria and narrow down the range of choice to the most appropriate options”.

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03 May 2019

The Islamic World Citation Center, based in Iran, has published a global ranking of universities. There are four criteria, Research, Education, International Activity, and Innovation. The overall rankings are dominated by the USA with Harvard in first place followed by Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). India continues to do poorly especially for Innovation where there are only three institutions in the top 1,000. In contrast, there are 142 Chinese institutions in the top 1,000 for that criterion.

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29 April 2019

The business magazine Forbes has published the latest edition of its Best Value Colleges ranking. This is an attempt to assist students and stakeholders by providing them with information about the economic value of a college education. Data were collected for 645 colleges and universities which were given scores for six criteria: quality determined by the 2018 Forbes Top Colleges, net price, net debt, alumni earnings, graduation rate, and access for low income students. The first four have a weighting of 20% each and the last two 10%.

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25 April 2019

The Education Policy Centre at the Faculty of Education of Charles University in the Czech Republic has published a study by Aleš Bartušek and Jan Koucký, Cross Ranking 2018: Comparing World Higher Education Systems and Institutions, that analyses the relationships between the universities included in three well known global rankings, the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), the QS World University Rankings, and the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings.

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23 April 2019

The Scimago Institutions Rankings (Spain) are published by the Scimago Lab and use data provided by Scopus to measure and compare the research, innovation and Societal Impact of global universities and research centres. The methodology is based on the following metrics:

• Research (50%) including 11 indicators relating to citations, publications and international collaboration
• Innovation (30%) including three indications based on patents
• Societal Impact (20%) including altmetrics, back links and web size.

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19 April 2019

The latest edition of the Round University Rankings (RUR) has been announced. These are published by the Moscow based RUR rankings Agency. They use 20 indicators to compare universities, combined in four groups: Research (40% weighting), Teaching (40%), International Diversity (10%), and Financial Stability (10%). Data is provided by the Global Institutional Profiles Project (GIPP) run by Clarivate Analytics, the Web of Science Core Collection, and the GIPP’s academic survey which currently has about 60,000 respondents.

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