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Category: Research

Autonomy, Quality and World-Class Universities

My colleague Pam Marcucci and I have been spending some time in Jakarta recently on a USAID project relating to improving the country’s higher education system. One of the key issues the project is facing is that of “autonomy.” If you read the policy literature on higher education, you’ll know that university autonomy is seen as a kind if sine qua non of educational quality: you can’t really have a great university without it. The first paragraph of pretty much

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April 25, 2012 No Comments

Bibliometrics Part Four: Introducing the H-Index

Pretty much all systems of statistical performance measurement face a trade-off between meaningfulness and simplicity. Straightforward, easy-to-understand statistics usually don’t tell you very much because the process of simplification inevitably leaves out important aspects of reality; statistics which take complexity into account are usually clunky and difficult to explain to a lay audience. So it is with bibliometrics. We can count scholarly publications, but what if someone is just publishing in obscure journals that no one reads? We can adjust

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April 5, 2012 1 Comment

Bibliometrics III: The Leiden Rankings

One of my favourite bibliometric analysis tools is the criminally-underused (at least in Canada) Leiden Rankings. The nice thing about Leiden – apart from it being global in scope – is its web-based, interactive nature. Users can choose comparators by region or country, whether or not to use non-English-language papers and how to normalize for institutional size. Unlike most rankings (e.g., the Times Higher), it’s the user that’s in control. Most importantly, users choose the indicators for comparisons. One can

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March 29, 2012 1 Comment

Bibliometrics, Part the First

The shock and horror generated by proposals of teaching-only universities makes it pretty clear that most of Canadian academia thinks that research is important. So important, indeed, that we want every professor to devote 40% of his or her time (under the 40-40-20 rule) to it. Now, that’s a pretty serious commitment. Even before you get to the costs of graduate students, research grants and research infrastructure, 40% of staff time equals $2 billion/year on research. So why do we

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March 23, 2012 1 Comment

Ivory Tower Stakhanovites

Those of you familiar with mid-century Soviet culture will be acquainted with the work of Alexey Stakhanov, a Ukrainian miner who was so enthused by the ideals of socialism that he would constantly overfulfill his coal quota. On one occasion in 1935, he managed to mine 227 tons of coal in a single shift, which was equivalent to about 30 times his production target. It was a propaganda stunt, of course. But Stakhanov’s legend lives on, not least in the

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February 17, 2012 3 Comments
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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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