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Category: Rankings

Times Higher Education Rankings – Hype

Okay, everybody take a valium. Quick recap: Times Higher Education, for a change, kept its methodology stable two years in a row. That means that for once, it’s okay to compare data across years. But – shock! Horror! – Canada’s three standard-bearers all fell in the rankings – U of T from 19th to 21st, UBC from 22nd to 30th and McGill from 28th to 34th. Cue the usual suspects grasping for an opportunity to talk about underfunding. “This is a wake-up call, we

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October 5, 2012 No Comments

A Response to Critics

So, we’ve been hearing a number of criticisms – both directly and via the grapevine – of the research rankings we released last week. (Warning: if you’re not entranced by bibliometric methodology, you can safely skip today’s post). The main point at issue is that at some schools, our staff counts appear to be on the high side. Based on this, some schools have inferred that we are judging them too harshly – that if we had fewer observations, the denominator would

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September 6, 2012 No Comments

Who’s Not in the U-15 (But Could Be)

One of the interesting things about our new research rankings – which unlike previous attempts at such things are fully field-normalized – is that it shines a very different light on who the “leaders” are in terms of research. Back in the day, the ten “leading” research institutions in the country (Laval, McGil, Montreal, Queen’s, Toronto, McMaster, Waterloo, Western, Alberta and UBC) created the “G-10.” It was a talking-shop, mostly: a forum where big universities could exchange data quietly amongst themselves. Around

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August 31, 2012 3 Comments

Research Rankings: Burning Questions

We understand that some results from our research rankings are causing some head-scratching. We thought we’d give you some insight into some of the key puzzles. Q: Why isn’t U of T first? U of T is always first. The fact that we didn’t include medical research is a big reason; had we done so, the results might have been quite different. But part of it also is that Toronto’s best subjects tend to be ones with high research costs and high

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August 30, 2012 4 Comments

Research Rankings

Today, we at HESA are releasing our brand new Canadian Research Rankings. We’re pretty proud of what we’ve accomplished here, so let me tell you a bit about them. Unlike previous Canadian research rankings conducted by Research InfoSource, these aren’t simply about raw money and publication totals. As we’ve already seen, those measures tend to privilege strength in some disciplines (the high-citation, high-cost ones) more than others. Institutions which are good in low-citation, low-cost disciplines simply never get recognized in these schemes.

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August 29, 2012 1 Comment
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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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