This ranking system evaluates and ranks the scientific paper performance for the top 500 universities in worldwide. Three criteria are represented by eight indicators were used to assess a university’s overall scientific paper performance: research productivity (accounting for 20% of the score), research impact (30%), and research excellence (50%).
This annual ranking system has begun since 2007. Currently, aside from this ranking system, there are various major university rankings such as the Academic Ranking of World Universities by Shanghai Jiao Tong University (ARWU), the THE World University Rankings by Times Higher Education (THE) and the QS World University Rankings by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Spain, the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) by Leiden University in Netherlands, Global Ranking of World Universities by Rating of Educational Resources (RatER ), and so on. Among these rankings, ARWU, THE and QS are well-known and most commonly discussed.
ARWU emphasizes the ranking in academic performance with the award number of Nobel Prize and Fields Prize, the number of released articles in the journals of “Nature” and “Science”, and the quantitative number of highly cited academics. THE focuses on the performance of teaching, cited number, research internationalization and the income of industry-university, a total of 13 indicators to assess the world’s university academic performance. QS Ranking is based on academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty citation, the faculty and student ratio, and international faculty and students. HEEACT ranking system focuses on the ranking of scientific paper performance. The emphasis on current research performance makes the indicators of this ranking system more objective than the traditional indicators such as a university’s reputation reflected by peer reviews or the number of Nobel Prize winners affiliated with an university, which tend to favor universities with longer histories or the universities in developed countries.
HEEACT has first launched the Academic Ranking of World Universities in 2007 and has published the field based ranking in 2008. HEEACT furthered provided the extended subject ranking in the fields of Science and Engineering in 2010. In 2011, HEEACT will only release the ranking of Top 500 universities in overall performance, the ranking results of field and subject will be separately announced.
This ranking system employs quantitative data drawn from Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) to evaluate the scientific paper performances of world universities. Today, the performance of the release publication in international academic journals is the predominant mode of scientific research output. Statistics on the articles published in international academic journals provide an objective representation of each university’s research performance.
Furthermore, since the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) began to publish SCI and SSCI in 1961, the two databases have grown over years to include a good number of academic journals that are both international in scope and comprehensive in subject representation. However, it should be noted that results of this ranking system may favor universities with better performances in sciences and social sciences and under-represent performances in arts and humanities research. The database Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) mainly indexes journals in English language, while arts and humanities researchers often publish in various forms of publications (e.g., books) in their native languages.
Therefore, this ranking system does not include the database of A&HCI because it may fail to represent the objectivity and accuracy in the research performance of arts and humanities researchers. Focusing on data obtained from SCI and SSCI allows for fairer comparisons across global universities. The indicators used in this ranking system feature three characteristics as follows:
1.Emphasize 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 the score in each university is based on the number of citations to its published articles, h-index of the last 2 years, number of Highly Cited Papers, and number of articles published in high-impact journals (Hi-Impact journal articles). These indicators will be further explained in the Indicators section.
2.Neutralize biases caused by the university size or faculty number.
The size of a university would unavoidably affects its ranking when the number of articles is regarded as a sole indicator for research output. Because the number of articles is closely tied to the number of faculty members; employing the numbers of articles often favor larger-sized universities. This ranking system corrects the flaw in incorporating the average number of citations and h-index in the calculation of universities’ performance scores (explained in below). The inclusion of the two indicators, which together account for 30% of the total score, balances the assessments of quality and quantity of research and provides a fairer representation of a university’s performance regardless of its size.
To show a further influence of university size on the ranking HEEACT ranking system also provides an adjusted ranking based on the university size. Four indicators significantly affected by university size are normalized by each university’s number of full-time faculty; these include the number of articles of the last 11 years, number of published articles in the current year, number of citations of the last 11 years, and the number of citations of the last 2 years. This ranking system employs faculty numbers obtained from the following sources (listed by priority in usage): numbers of full-time faculty obtained from university web sites, numbers of faculty registered at each higher education administration in a country, and numbers of faculty/staff obtained from university web sites.
3.Take into account a university’s short-term research performance (constituting 55% of the score), which ensures a more objective comparison between universities of various lengths of history.
The indicators used in this ranking system 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 the undifferentiated indicators which favor the universities with longer histories. These short-term performance indicators are including the number of articles of the current year, the number of citations of the last 2 years, the h-index of the last 2 years, and the number of articles of the current year in high-impact journals.
Through the use of the indicators, this ranking system attempts to objectively compare the research performance and achievement of the worldwide universities. The relative strengths and weaknesses of a university revealed in the ranking provide insights into the higher education administration and resources allocation.
Important Notice:
Next year(2012) ,the HEEACT ranking will not be sponsored by the HEEACT, if you have any questions or concerns, please contact the NTU research group.
Mu-Hsuan Huang, Professor
Department of Library and Information Science, National Taiwan University
mhhuang@ntu.edu.tw
http://taiwanranking.lis.ntu.edu.tw/