Irreproducibility of the results of the Shanghai academic ranking of world universities

Răzvan V. Florian

Full text: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1712-1

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Abstract

I discuss the difficulties that I encountered in reproducing the results of the Shanghai ranking of world universities. In the Shanghai ranking, the dependence between the score for the SCI indicator and the weighted number of considered articles obeys a power law, instead of the proportional dependence that is suggested by the official methodology of the ranking. Discrepancies from proportionality are also found in some of the scores for the N&S and Size indicators. This shows that the results of the Shanghai ranking cannot be reproduced, given raw data and the public methodology of the ranking.

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