Abstract
To provide users insight into the value and limits of world university rankings, a comparative analysis is conducted of 5 ranking systems: ARWU, Leiden, THE, QS and U - Multirank. It links these systems with one another at the level of individual institutions, and analyses the overlap in institutional coverage, geographical coverage, how indicators are calculated from raw data, the skewnessskewness of indicator distributions, and statistical correlations between indicators. Four secondary analyses are presented investigating national academic systems and selected pairs of indicators.
This chapter re-uses with permission the text of Moed (2017b).
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Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank two referees of the journal Scientometrics for their useful comments on an earlier version of this paper. The author is also grateful to the members of the Nucleo di Valutazione of the Sapienza University of Rome for stimulating discussions about the interpretation and the policy significance of world university rankings.
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Moed, H.F. (2017). A Comparative Study of Five World University Rankings. In: Applied Evaluative Informetrics. Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Scientific and Scholarly Communication. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60522-7_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60522-7_18
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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