23 October 2019

The US News has published the Best Global Universities rankings. These are entirely research based and do not include metrics related to teaching or third missions. The overall rankings this year contain few surprises at the very top with the first place going to Harvard. However, a glance at the indicator and subject ranks suggest that there are signs that Harvard’s dominance is in danger. Although the university takes first place for global and regional research reputation, publications, total citations and papers among the top 10% and 1 % most cited, it does relatively poorly for conferences and international collaboration and scores below several Asian universities for engineering disciplines.

The top twenty includes three British universities, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London, and one Canadian, the University of Toronto. The other 16 are all from the USA.

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20 October 2019

Universities have often claimed that adequate funding is a prerequisite for academic research and teaching. However, a paper presented at the recent World Class Universities Conference in Shanghai suggests that this may not always be the case. A conference session discussed the factors that underlay academic excellence.

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18 October 2019

QS have released their Emerging Europe and Central Asia university rankings which now ranks 350 institutions. The rankings are dominated by Russia with Lomonosov Moscow State University, Saint Petersburg State University and Novosibersk State University taking the top three spots. However, institutions in the Czech Republic, Poland and Turkey also performed well. Charles University in Prague reached fifth place, Czech Technical University in Prague ninth and Masaryk University tenth. Jagiellonian University in Kraków was sixth and the University of Warsaw seventh. There were five Turkish universities in the top twenty although none in the top ten.

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A comment from university’s angle

At the end of every year, the complete picture of annual university rankings is unveiled. As for every university administrator (whether my colleagues admit it or not), it gives me a sense of insight on higher education performances but also some headaches related to what I believe are flaws in some indicators. The biggest of headaches is that of citations...

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08 October 2019

The latest edition of Maclean’s rankings of Canadian universities has been published. Universities are divided into three categories: Primarily Undergraduate, Comprehensive, and Medical Doctoral.

Institutions are ranked according to five criteria derived from 14 indicators, based on public statistics, bibliometric data, and surveys of students, faculty, administrators, counsellors and employers. The indicators are number of students winning national awards, student-faculty ratio, student satisfaction, number of faculty winning awards, research grants, research publications, citations, expenditure, research income, library services and budget, student services, scholarships and services, and reputation surveys.

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Prof. Frede Blaabjerg of Aalborg University in Denmark together with Prof. Khalil Amine of the United States received the prestigious world science award ‘Global Energy Prize’  in acknowledgement of their outstanding contribution to the transition to green energy. The press release mentions that the “Global Energy Prize” has been recognized by IREG Observatory as one of 99 main international scientific awards in the world. It is an acknowledgment of IREG Observatory as a “standard setting organization”.

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