From Declan Butler in Nature:
Every autumn, politicians, university administrators, funding offices and countless students wait impatiently for the World University Rankings produced by Britain’s Times Higher Education(THE) magazine. A position in the upper echelons of the THEranking can influence policy-makers’ higher-education investments, determine which institutions attract the best researchers or students, and prompt universities to try to boost their ratings.
But academics and universities have long criticized what they describe as the outsized influence of the THE and other university rankings, saying that their methodology and data are problematic (see Nature447, 514–515; 2007). Many universities see wild swings in their rankings from year to year, for example, which cannot reflect real changes in quality; and many French universities’ ratings suffer because their researchers’ publications often list affiliations with national research agencies as well as the university itself, diluting the benefit for the university. Now, universities and other stakeholders are developing their own rankings to tackle these shortcomings.
“Rankings have outgrown the expectations of those who started them,” says Kazimierz Bilanow, managing director of the IREG Observatory on Academic Rankings and Excellence, a Warsaw-based ranking quality-assurance body created in October 2009. “What were often exercises intended to boost newspaper circulation have come to have enormous influence on policy-making and funding of institutions and governments.”
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