Tag: Bibliometrics

The World’s Rising Scientific Research Nations

I was sitting at home this weekend, reading the UNESCO World Science Report (2021), as one does, when I started poking around with the actual bibliometric numbers.  And damned if there weren’t some big surprises in there.  First: what is the UNESCO World Science Report?  Well, it’s a pretty interesting document which has appeared periodically since 1993.  Over time, the document has become longer and more complicated.  And for the last few editions, it has produced some statistical annexes examining

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2020 Rankings Round-up

The three big global ranking outfits – The QS World University Rankings, the THE World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (aka Shanghai Rankings) have all released their rankings in the last few weeks, so it’s time to check in and see what if anything has changed.  (A couple of preliminaries: the Shanghai rankings go by the calendar year in which they are released, so this year’s the 2020 edition, while the other two are more like automobile manufacturers and have their date

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Changing Finances of World-Class Universities Part 3

So now we come to the heart of the matter: what’s actually going on in terms of publication outcomes (both the number and the impact)? For the first couple of graphs, I’m going to include the 11 top-200 schools from the People’s Republic of China just for the sheer fun of it (I have China data for research, but not finances). Figure 1 takes shows the increase in research output at top-200 universities, by country, for the years 2014-2017 over

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Who Are Canada’s Research Powerhouses?

Yesterday, the good folks at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University released their 2019 world ranking of university research output.  This is – in my opinion – the best bibliometric ranking out there: it is complete, nuanced and the people putting it out have thought hard and responsibly about what it means to use quantitatively evaluate research.  I thought it was time to have a quick look at the research landscape across Canada. Let’s start with raw

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A New Set of International Rankings (I)

Times Higher Education (THE) is putting out its brand spanking new “Impact Rankings” tomorrow morning in North America (it’s an evening launch at an event in Korea but timed to hit the papers at lunch time in Europe and for the early news cycle over here).  Today, I want to go through a little bit of background to these new rankings: tomorrow (Wednesday), the blog will be delayed a few hours so I can get you some analysis of the

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