Category: Rankings

Bibliometrics Finale: Age and Size

Today, we use our H-index Benchmarking of Academic Research (HiBAR) to look at the relationship between institutional characteristics and H-index scores. We’ve talked a lot this week about the positive correlation between a researcher’s age and his or her H-index score. But there’s another correlation to watch for: normalized institutional average H-index scores and institutional age. Check it out: Normalized Institutional Average H-Index Score as a Function of Institutional Age The result isn’t wholly clear cut: there are a lot

Read More »

Bibliometrics: Who’s the Best?

Today, we released the full version of our bibliometric paper, showing H-index averages on a discipline-by-discipline basis. You can find it here. (Keep in mind while reading it that the H-index isn’t a wholly straightforward statistic to interpret. If one discipline has an H-index of 10 and another has an H-index of five, you can’t simply say that professors in one discipline publish twice as much as the other. An H-index is just the largest number of publications for which

Read More »

Bibliometrics: Canada’s Top Ten Science Faculties

We promise fun bibliometric data, we deliver fun bibiometric data. Today: we show you how to use H-index data to identify the top ten science faculties in Canada. As we saw yesterday, science has the highest average H-index of any field; the average Canadian science professor has an H-index of 10.6. Recall that the H-index is the largest number of publications for which one also has at least the same number of citations – five papers with at least five

Read More »

A Global Common Data Set

My colleague Kris Olds recently had an interesting point about the business model behind the Times Higher Education’s (THE) world university rankings. Since 2009 data collection for the rankings has been done by Thomson Reuters. This data comes from three sources. One is bibliometric analysis, which Thomson can do on the cheap because it owns the Web of Science database. The second is a reputational survey of academics. And the third is a survey of institutions, in which schools themselves provide

Read More »

Ranking Higher Education Systems

As you may know, a new ranking of national systems of higher education was released a couple of weeks ago. The ranking was put together by a team of Monash University professors led by Ross Williams, and published by the Melbourne Institute and Universitas 21, a global alliance of 24 research intensive universities. It’s not the first attempt to rank national systems – we here at HESA have done two iterations of a global ranking on affordability and accessibility – but

Read More »