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Tag: Bibliometrics

The Leiden Rankings 2013

Though it was passed over in silence here in Canada, the new Leiden university research rankings made a bit of a splash elsewhere, last week.  I gave a brief overview of the Leiden rankings last year.  Based on five years’ worth of Web of Science publication and citation data (2008-2012), it is by some distance the best way to compare institutions’ current research output and performance.  The Leiden rankings have always allowed comparisons along a number of dimensions of impact and

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April 25, 2013 No Comments

No to “World-Class” Research in the Humanities

You often hear talk about how Canadian institutions need to do more research.  Better research.  “World-class” research, even.  Research that will prove how smart our professors are, how efficient they are with public resources, and, hence, justify a claim to an even greater share of those resources. In medicine, the biological sciences, and engineering, this call is easy to understand.  Developments in these areas can – with the right environment for commercialization – lead to new products, which, in turn,

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April 5, 2013 11 Comments

Research Rankings Reloaded

You’ll recall that a couple of months ago we released a set of research rankings; you may also remember that complaints were raised about a couple of issues in our methodology. Specifically, critics argued was that by including all permanent faculty we had drawn the net too wide, and that we should have excluded part-timers. Well, we’ve now re-done the analysis, and are releasing them today as an annex to our original publication for all to see. Two key things to highlight about

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October 26, 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

Too Much Peer Review?

One way in which Canada stands out internationally in higher education is our ultra-reliance on individual peer review as a means of allocating research funding. While peer review is in many ways the “gold standard” of research assessment mechanisms, it has the drawback of being incredibly time-consuming, both for the applicant and for the assessors. What’s the alternative, though? Well, as Paula Stephan points out in her quite excellent book How Economics Shape Science, there are a number of ways that

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September 4, 2012 No 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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