In 2007 HEEACT announced the first world universities ranking based on scientific papers performance. The 2007 ranking focused on the overall performance of each university in the quantity and quality of scientific papers. While it provided indication of each university’s level of achievement, it did not show each university’s performance in various subject fields. However, achievements in different fields may affect the assessment of a university’s overall performance. Huge discrepancy between fields can significantly bias the overall performance based ranking. For example, between January 1997 and August 2007, a total of 1,868,486 papers in clinical medicine were indexed in WOS, and the number of citations was 20,643,979; while in engineering only 723,371 papers were indexed (cited 2,542,146 times). As one can imagine, the undifferentiating overall performance ranking may have favored universities with clinical medicine departments and/or research institutions.

Recognizing the potential bias of the 2007 ranking, from 2008 HEEACT will begin to provide subject field based rankings of world universities in addition to the overall performance based ranking. Currently, only three ongoing university ranking programs offer field based rankings -- the Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities by HEEACT, the QS World University Rankings by Times Higher Education Supplement (THES), and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) by Shanghai Jiao Tong University (Table 1). The THES ranking is based on peer review measures, which are easily affected by reviewers’ subjective opinions rather than assess the actual performance of a university. The ARWU ranking, while using quantitative indicators such as numbers of Nobel Prize winners and highly cited researchers, tends to favor universities with extraordinary achievements and can fail to differentiate universities of moderate performances. In contrast, the HEEACT ranking employs objective bibliometric indicators that evaluate both the quantity and quality of a university’s scientific papers, and incorporates the assessment of long-term and short-term achievements in the composite measures.

  Table 1 Comparisons of three field-based university rankings

This project employs objective quantitative data drawn from Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) to evaluate the scientific paper performances of world universities by fields. The six fields in this project are Agriculture & Environment Sciences (AGE), Clinical Medicine (MED), Engineering, Computing & Technology (ENG), Life Sciences (LIFE), Natural Sciences (SCI), Social Sciences (SOC).
 

The performance measures are composed of eight indicators to assess a university’s overall scientific paper performance along three criteria: research productivity (accounting for 20%), research impact (30%), and research excellence (50%). Different from the THES ranking which focuses on university ranking, and the ARWU ranking which focuses on academic ranking, this project focuses on scientific papers performance ranking. The emphasis on current research performance makes the indicators a fairer one than some traditional indicators such as a university’s reputation or the number of Nobel Prize winners affiliated with that university, which tends to favor universities with longer histories or universities in developed countries. Generally speaking, the indicators used in this field-based ranking have at least the following three features:

  1.It emphasizes the quality of research; the indicators assessing research quality (research impact and research excellence) account for 80% of the performance score.

Research impact and research excellence evaluate the quality of a university’s research output. The calculation of each university’s score is based on the number of citations of its published articles in each field, h-index of the last two years, number of Highly Cited Papers, number of articles published in high-impact journals (hi-impact journal articles) (these indicators will be explained further in the Indicators section).

  2.It takes into account a university’s short-term research performance (constituting 55% of the score), thus ensuring a fairer comparison between universities of various lengths of history.

The indicators used in this field-based ranking seek to represent both the long-term and short-term research performances of a university. The inclusion of indicators evaluating short-term performances corrects the flaws resulted from undifferentiating indicators that favor universities of longer histories. These short-term performance indicators constituting 55% of the score include: the number of articles in the current year, the number of citations in the last two years, h-index of the last two years, and the number of articles in high-impact journals in the current year (explained further in the Indicators section).

Through the use of the proposed indicators, this project attempts to objectively portray the current field research performance in Taiwan’s universities in comparison to universities worldwide. The relative strengths and weaknesses revealed in the field rankings provide insights into the higher education administration and resources allocation. This project also intends to update the field-based ranking annually in order to encourage the development of specific field strengths in Taiwan’s universities.