Leiden climbs in Shanghai Rankings
Which universities are the best in the world? And the best in Europe? In mid-August two authoritative annual rankings were published: the ‘Shanghai Ranking’ and the ‘Leiden Ranking’. Both rankings pertain exclusively to scientific research, and Leiden University has gained a higher position in both rankings.
Differences
The exact position a university occupies in the ranking depends on the methods and criteria used in the rankings. The most striking difference between the two rankings is that the Shanghai Ranking takes into consideration the reputations built up by the individual universities, based on such laurels as Nobel Prizes. The Leiden Ranking, on the other hand, measures current strengths only. The method used in the Leiden Ranking is more refined, and takes into account such factors as the citation culture within specific disciplines when measuring the impact of scientific articles on the academic community.
Shanghai Ranking: 70th position in world top 100
In Shanghai University’s ‘Academic Ranking of World Universities’ Leiden occupies 70th place in the global top 100. In 2009, Leiden was in 72nd position.
The Universities of Utrecht and Leiden are the only Dutch Universities in this top 100, where Utrecht takes 50th place. The list is headed by three American universities: Harvard, Berkeley and Stanford. The first European university on the list is in fifth place: Cambridge University in Great Britain.
Main criteria for Shanghai Ranking
Each year, researchers in Shanghai review over 1,000 universities. The best 500 are included in their ranking. The prime criteria include the number of times a university’s faculty members have had articles published in scientific journals such as Nature and Science. The researchers also take into account the number of awards, such as Nobel Prizes and Field Medals (the most important award in mathematics), that a university’s faculty and students received in that year. The Shanghai Ranking also takes into consideration the number of times citations have been taken from an academic publication.
Read more about the Shanghai Rankings.
Leiden Ranking: 49th in world top 100
The Leiden Ranking, which was developed by Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), is more sophisticated. It has several sub-rankings, all based on different indicators or combinations of indicators. Leiden University is in the global top 100 of all these sub-rankings. The most balanced version, which its maker, Professor Ton van Raan, claims best reflects a university’s quality, counts the number of quotations per publication, with a correction for each field: the ‘field-standardised impact ranking’. In this ranking Leiden is in 49th place in the top 100 of the largest – i.e. most widely published – universities in the world. A comparison with last year is difficult as there was no top 100 in 2009. But there was a top 250, and in that ranking Leiden climbed from 121 to 84.
In global top 100: in top 10 of European universities
This field-standardised global top 100 lists 30 European universities, four of which are in the Netherlands: along with Leiden, these are Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) (no. 42), Utrecht University (no. 50) and Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) (no. 52). Of the 30 European universities in this ranking, Leiden is ninth. EUR is sixth, Utrecht tenth and UvA eleventh. Cambridge University tops the list, as it does the Shanghai Ranking.
List of 100 biggest European universities: Leiden 16th
Along with this global ranking, Leiden Ranking also publishes a separate European ranking. In this field-standardised variant, Leiden takes 16th place (27th place last year). There are eight Dutch universities in the European top 100; EUR is the highest, in 11th place; Utrecht is 17th and Amsterdam University 18th. This list is topped by Göttingen University.
Colour-coded list
The Leiden Ranking 2010 lists the 500 largest universities, largest when measured in numbers of publications. The Leiden Ranking uses so-called bibliometrical methods to determine the current strength of a university. It does so in various ways and shows the results in lists of different colours. The yellow list, for example, rates universities on the basis of size, measured in numbers of publications. Leiden comes in 95th on this list of the 100 largest universities in the world. The blue list shows the number of citations per publication and so indicates the impact of publications on the academic world, regardless of the size of any university. In this list, Leiden takes a very high 36th place. Leiden owes its high ranking mainly to the fields of medicine, physics, astronomy and chemistry.
Weighting per discipline
The above-mentioned field-standardised impact ranking is the dark-green list, which is the fairest list, according to Professor Van Raan. This ranking is also based on the number of citations per publication, but then weighted for each field, something the Shanghai Ranking does not do. The reason is that citation is much less frequent in some fields, such as the technical or social sciences, than in others, such as medicine. If you do not adjust for this factor, a technical university, for example, will be at a disadvantage. Leiden ranks 49 in this field-standardised impact ranking.
No ranking is perfect
No matter how sophisticated a ranking may be, none of them are perfect. Researchers in the humanities, for example, write mostly books and not that many articles in peer reviewed journals. Books, however, do not yet count in the rankings. A truly accurate comparison of research done in the humanities is still difficult to make.
Read more about the Leiden Ranking.
(24 August 2010)