Should you believe in the Shanghai ranking? An MCDM view
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TLDR
The view is that the Shanghai ranking, in spite of the media coverage it receives, does not qualify as a useful and pertinent tool to discuss the “quality” of academic institutions, let alone to guide the choice of students and family or to promote reforms of higher education systems.Abstract:
This paper proposes a critical analysis of the “Academic Ranking of World Universities”, published every year by the Institute of Higher Education of the Jiao Tong University in Shanghai and more commonly known as the Shanghai ranking. After having recalled how the ranking is built, we first discuss the relevance of the criteria and then analyze the proposed aggregation method. Our analysis uses tools and concepts from Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). Our main conclusions are that the criteria that are used are not relevant, that the aggregation methodology is plagued by a number of major problems and that the whole exercise suffers from an insufficient attention paid to fundamental structuring issues. Hence, our view is that the Shanghai ranking, in spite of the media coverage it receives, does not qualify as a useful and pertinent tool to discuss the “quality” of academic institutions, let alone to guide the choice of students and family or to promote reforms of higher education systems. We outline the type of work that should be undertaken to offer sound alternatives to the Shanghai ranking.read more
Citations
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On the Methodological Framework of Composite Indices: A Review of the Issues of Weighting, Aggregation, and Robustness
Salvatore Greco,Salvatore Greco,Alessio Ishizaka,Menelaos Tasiou,Gianpiero Torrisi,Gianpiero Torrisi +5 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors put composite indicators under the spotlight, examining the wide variety of methodological approaches in existence and offered a more recent outlook on the advances made in this field over the past years.
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The Leiden ranking 2011/2012: Data collection, indicators, and interpretation
Ludo Waltman,Clara Calero-Medina,Joost Kosten,Ed C. M. Noyons,Robert J. W. Tijssen,Nees Jan van Eck,Thed N. van Leeuwen,Anthony F. J. van Raan,Martijn S. Visser,Paul Wouters +9 more
TL;DR: The Leiden Ranking 2011/2012 as discussed by the authors is a ranking of universities based on bibliometric indicators of publication output, citation impact, and scientific collaboration, which includes 500 major universities from 41 different countries.
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Comparing university rankings
TL;DR: The findings show that there are reasonable similarities between the rankings, even though each applies a different methodology, and overall the similarities are increased when the comparison is limited to the European universities.
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Rickety numbers: Volatility of university rankings and policy implications
TL;DR: In this article, a robustness analysis based on a multi-modeling approach is proposed to test the validity of the inference about the rankings produced in the Academic Ranking of World Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and those produced by the UK's Times Higher Education Supplement (THES).
References
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