A fresh approach to evaluating the academic ranking of world universities

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present new ideas in evaluating Shanghai University's Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). One issue frequently put forth in various publications is that the Shanghai rankings are sensitive to the relative weight they attribute to each variable. As a possible remedy to this issue, the statistical I-distance method is proposed to be used. Based on a sample containing the top 100 ranked universities, the results show a significant correlation with the official ARWU list. However, some inconsistencies concerning European universities have been noticed and elaborated upon.

Textural and physico-chemical characteristics of white brined goat cheeses made from frozen milk and curd. The use of square I - distance statistics

“…In this paper, distance between entities (cheeses) was calculated using the Square I-distance (Jeremic et al, 2011) where d i is the distance between the control and the experimental cheese for variable X i , σ i is the standard deviation for variable X i , and r ji.12…j-1 is a partial coefficient of the correlation between X i and X j , (j < i).…”

“…Then the value of the discriminative effect of X 3 which is not covered by X 1 and X 2 is added. Procedure is repeated for all variables until complete discriminative effect was obtained for each entity that needs to be ranked (Ivanovic, 1977;Jeremic et al, 2011). Considering the characteristics of this statistical tool, it should be used when there is a need to compare experimental entities to some fictional or control entity examining a number of variables, which would result with a single number for each entity.…”

Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analyses of PISA Efficiency: Distance Based Analysis Approach

“…It can affect sports competitions, exams, medicine selection, university ranking, and many other areas [36,37,38,39,40]. For creating an objective image of ranking of the observed entities we propose Idistance method [39,40,41,42].…”

“…Originally it was proposed and defined by B. Ivanovic in 1963 [37]. Affirmation of this method has been made in University ranking [39] and evaluating the socio-economic development of countries [41].…”

<i>Excellence with Leadership</i>: the crown indicator of <i>Scimago Institutions Rankings Iber report</i>

“…Consequently, those rankings are quite often used as an indicator of a university's reputation and performance (Agasisti; Pérez-Esparrells, 2010; Altbach, 2013; Bonaccorsi; Daraio, 2008; Bowman; Bastedo, 2011;Hazelkorn, 2011;Hien, 2010;Jeremić et al, 2011;Marginson, 2011;Sadlak, 1978;Salmi, 2003;TorresSalinas et al, 2011;García et al, 2012). One can argue that "University rankings are very appealing, in that they provide a single number that allows, at a glance, to situate a given university in the worldwide context.…”