Category: Rankings

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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Moneyball

I was at a conference last week in Italy, much of which focused around the use of data in institutional decision-making (technically it was a conference on rankings, but increasingly rankings are being seen as a data source for institutional benchmarking and strategizing rather than as a consumer tool, so there was a lot of overlap). One of the most interesting presentations involved a lot of discussion on the sheer amount of data now available on institutional performance (which, depending

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From the Shelves of HESA Towers (II)

To continue with the occasional post on random books on the shelves at HESA Towers, today I want to talk about this book pictured below.  It doesn’t look like much, but it’s one of the most intriguing things kicking around the office.  It dates from the summer of 1967 and is called “The Gourman Report” Most histories of university rankings will tell you that the first commercial ranking of undergraduate institutions was in a 1983 edition of US News &

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A New Set of International Rankings (II)

The Times Higher Education “Impact” Rankings (which I described yesterday) just dropped a couple of hours ago.  You can browse the results here.  The main news you readers need to know is that CANADA IS AWESOME (at least if you give any credence to these rankings).  McMaster came second overall, UBC third, U Montréal seventh, and five other institutions (Waterloo, York, Toronto, Laval and Ottawa) making the top 100. McMaster also came first overall in the category “decent work and economic growth”

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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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