Future Now
The IFTF Blog
New global universities ranking
One of our summer research associates forwarded me word of this new ranking of universities based on Web indicators:
[W]e designed a combined assessment model for ranking the institutional domains of universities worldwide based on "Web presence" indicators. Three different features of these domains were assessed: the size of their Web presence (measured by the number of Web pages), visibility (reflected by the number of in-links from pages external to the domain), and the number of "rich" files available [e.g., PDFs, Word, Excel, PPT]. Here's their top ten:
Of course, this reminds me of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University world universities ranking project (discussed here).
To me, the surprising thing is how unsurprising the results are, and how the results of this study and the older Chinese study skew in the same way. As the authors put it, with admirable understatement, the "most productive research-oriented universities are among the leaders in the list." I suspect that universities with big science departments (especially physics departments) also get ranked higher because of the vast amounts of scientific data that are online (that's my working theory for Penn State being number 5 on this list, ahead of the likes of Yale and Caltech-- no offense to the Nittany Lions intended).
But the study doesn't seem to point out institutions that you wouldn't think of as significant if you measured other factors, but prove to be highly visible or productive online. I think it does a better job of revealing national patterns in academic Web usage. American universities occupy the first 19 spots in the worldwide ranking, and nearly 3/4 of the top 100; the U.K. has seven; Canada has six; Sweden has four; Switzerland three; Finland, Norway, Austria, Japan, and Germany each have one. If you look at 1-300, you see a lot of German and Canadian universities, plus many other Europeans; and a pretty diverse mix of Brazilian, Chinese, and other non-First World universities.
I suppose one virtue of a study like this is that it can be pretty easily updated, so we can how the list changes over time. I'll bet that most of the interesting action happens not in the top hundred, but rather along a couple other dimensions. Churn among the top five hundred would be interesting to track over years; the percentage of universities within a country that make it onto the list is another obvious thing to follow. A measure that takes into account the number of students and/or faculty (i.e., a per-person productivity metric) might reveal something unexpected.