scholarly journals How to boost the ranking of your university using self-citations? An example of the weaknesses of university ranking systems

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxime Mussard ◽  
Alex James

The example provided in this opinion article shows that it is now possible for a single academic to drastically increase the ranking of its university by abusing one of the weaknesses of a given ranking system. Due to the importance of these rankings nowadays in the media or public opinion, it is time to design a resilient and reliable ranking which can annihilate future potential manipulations and pressures from university administrations or governments. Indeed, we can easily imagine a university pushing professors to self-cite their work to increase the global ranking, and thus affecting universities and academics trying to do their job honestly. Other parameters may be as well easy to abuse to boost significantly a ranking artificially (for example: parameters involving ratios of staff and/or students). Such manipulations would be very detrimental to the quality of research and teaching worldwide in the future.It is time for the university ranking organisations to have a serious self-critic on their weaknesses and to think together with the academics about a ranking system which could be robust enough to annihilate such manipulations. Ideally, the ranking should push universities to increase the quality of their research and teaching, instead of encouraging academic misconduct. The credibility and the reputation of the academic world are now on the line.

Computers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Maliha Rashida ◽  
Kawsarul Islam ◽  
A. S. M. Kayes ◽  
Mohammad Hammoudeh ◽  
Mohammad Shamsul Arefin ◽  
...  

The website of a university is considered to be a virtual gateway to provide primary resources to its stakeholders. It can play an indispensable role in disseminating information about a university to a variety of audience at a time. Thus, the quality of an academic website requires special attention to fulfil the users’ need. This paper presents a multi-method approach of quality assessment of the academic websites, in the context of universities of Bangladesh. We developed an automated web-based tool that can evaluate any academic website based on three criteria, which are as follows: content of information, loading time and overall performance. Content of information contains many sub criteria, such as university vision and mission, faculty information, notice board and so on. This tool can also perform comparative analysis among several academic websites and generate a ranked list of these. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first initiative to develop an automated tool for accessing academic website quality in context of Bangladesh. Beside this, we have conducted a questionnaire-based statistical evaluation among several universities to obtain the respective users’ feedback about their academic websites. Then, a ranked list is generated based on the survey result that is almost similar to the ranked list got from the University ranking systems. This validates the effectiveness of our developed tool in accessing academic website.


2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-112
Author(s):  
Diki ◽  
Susy Puspitasari ◽  
Jasrial ◽  
Agus Djaya

Universitas Terbuka (UT) aims at achieving a world class standard. As one of the criteria of a world class university is the world ranking, it is planned that the university should achieve a high position within the ranking. At present, the ranking systems are the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) and Times Higher Education Supplement (THES). Positions of open universities in world university ranking are in the lower tier, both according to the THES and SJTU. However, ranking have a positive impact toward universities. Hence, it is possible that through the effort of achieving a high ranking, UT will have the benefit of improving its quality of services toward its stakeholders. If it is possible that ranking system criteria also fits the achievement of quality, there should be an advantage of gaining a high position in world ranking for UT. Therefore the question is how to improve the position of an open university within the international university ranking. Although the main priority of UT mission is to provide access of quality education to those who for some reason cannot attend conventional education, UT has opportunities for improving its rank among world university ranking. The advantage of the ranking is that it can support the effort to become a world class university. UT should improve international cooperation, both in teaching and research, while the research activities should be improved, both in its quality and its publications in accredited international journals. Lastly, the effort for achieving a high position in world ranking should not ignore the main mission of UT to provide access to education.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 86
Author(s):  
Narayana Mahendra Prastya

Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis aktivitas hubungan media yang dilakukan oleh Universitas Islam Indonesia, saat kejadian Tragedi Diksar Mapala UII. Kejadian tersebut merupakan krisis karena tidak diduga, terjadi secara mendadak, dan menimbulkan gangguan pada aktivitas dan citra organisasi. Hubungan media adalah salah satu aktivitas yang penting dalam manajemen krisis, karena media massa mampu mempengaruhi persepsi masyarakat terhadap satu organisasi dalam krisis. Dalam situasi krisis sendiri, persepsi dapat menjadi lebih kuat daripada fakta. Batasan hubungan media dalam tulisan ini adalah dalam aspek penyediaan informasi yang terdiri dari : (1) kualitas narasumber organisasi dan (2) cara organisasi dalam membantu liputan media. Data penelitian ini diperoleh dengan mewawancarai wartawan dari media di Yogyakarta yang meliput Diksar Mapala UII. Hasilnya menunjukkan bahwa media membutuhkan narasumber pimpinan tertinggi universitas. Informasi yang diperoleh dari humas universitas dirasa masih kurang cukup. Dalam hal upaya organisasi membantu aktivitas liputan, UII dinilai masih kurang cepat dan kurang terbuka dalam memberikan informasi. The purpose of this article is to analyse the media relations activities by Islamic University of Indonesia (UII), related to crisis "Tragedi Diksar Mapala UII". This incident lead to crisis because it is unpredictable, happen suddenly, disturb the organizational activities, and make the organization's image being at risk. Media relations is one important activites in crisis management. It is because mass media could affect the public perception toward an organization. In crisis situation, perception could be stronger than the fact. The limitation of media relations in this article are information subsidies. Information subsidies consist of : (1) the quality of news sources that provided by the organization, and (2) how organization facilitate the news gathering process by the media. The data for this article is being collected from interview with journalist from the mass media in Yogyakarta. The results are media want the top management of the universities as the news sources. The information that being provided by public relations is not enough. The university also lack of quickness and lack of openess.


2019 ◽  
Vol IV (II) ◽  
pp. 43-50
Author(s):  
Fazeelat Noreen ◽  
Bashir Hussain

Globalization and market-based orientation of higher education institutions has increased interest of students, parents, employers, universities, funding agencies, governments, and relevant stakeholders in knowing the rank of their concerned universities at national/global level. This has led to the emergence of several global university ranking systems. Aligned with international trends of ranking, Higher Education of Pakistan [HEC] also initiated ranking of universities at the national level in Pakistan. Subsequently, HEC designed comprehensive ranking criteria for ranking of universities and has implemented it since 2010. This study analyzes the nature of HEC ranking criteria and its constituent indicators from the perspective of global university ranking systems. Using content and thematic analysis, this study found that global university ranking systems mainly focus quality of research and teaching, while HEC additionally focuses effective and efficient use of resources, provision of facilities, social integration, and impact on community development.


2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-60
Author(s):  
Pradeepa Wijetunge

The objective of this study is to investigate the research productivity of the Sri Lankan state universities depicted in reputed international university ranking systems during 2015-2020 and to identify the areas that can be used to develop the research productivity of the state universities. Research–related scores of the Sri Lankan state universities from 2015-2020 in four ranking systems (THE, QS, SIR, and URAP) were analysed. The study established that the research productivity, impact, and collaboration are the major aspects considered by the ranking systems. Only a few universities are ranked and the scores have a considerable scope to be improved. Several recommendations are made on how the university librarians can support the improvement of research-related related rankings. This is the first study on research productivity scores of Sri Lankan state universities based on international ranking systems. Hence the findings will be useful for the university policymakers in Sri Lanka as well in other countries with similar educational contexts.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 24851-24854
Author(s):  
Hewa Majeed Zangana

Nowadays, more and more organizations are realizing of importance of their data, because it can be considered as an important asset in present nearly all business organizational processes. Information Technology Division (ITD) is a department in the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) that consolidates efforts in providing IT services to the university. The university data management started with decentralized units, where each center or division has its own hardware and database system. Later it improved to become became centralized, and ITD is now trying to one policy across the whole university. This will optimize the high performance of data management in the university. A visit has been done to ITD building and a presentation has been conducted discussing many issues concerning data management quality maturity in IT division at IIUM. We got some notices like server’s room location, power supply and backup and existence of data redundant. These issues are discussed in details in the next sections of this paper and some recommendations are suggested to improve data quality in the university. The quality of the data is very important in decision making, especially for a university that is trying to improve its strategy towards a research university and rise its rank among the World University Ranking.


2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
Anil Kumar Nassa ◽  
Jagdish Arora

Ranking of higher education institutions (HEI) is a convenient and easily understandable method of evaluation and assessment. An ordinal number assigned to an HEI by a ranking system represents its comparative position in a list of ranked institutions based on marks obtained by it on various performance parameters or indicators. Ranking of HEIs have been lauded and criticised simultaneously. University rankings are often criticised for methodology used, choice of indicators and weightage assigned to them, focus on science, technology and English language publications, assessment of institutions as whole (instead of individual program) and the practice of assigning an ordinal number or a rank to represent quality of an HEI. At the same time, university rankings are lauded for serving as information tools for students, researchers, funding agencies, policy makers and other stakeholders as well as for instilling a competitive spirit amongst institutions to perform better in ranking systems. However, most experts agree that rankings are here to stay in the education market place. As such, although ranking system cannot measure quality of education and research in absolute term, it does serve as indicator to various aspects of quality in higher education, which, in turn, can be used by institutions themselves for improving their performance on these parameters. While universities are welcomed to use rankings for improving their performance, ranking systems should not dictate university policy, either at a national or institutional level, but should be used as a source of information for guiding policies that should be decided according to the needs of the university’s own community, traditions, market niche, national role and so on1.


10.28945/3426 ◽  
2016 ◽  

This paper explains the development of a system of academic ranking across the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) colleges and universities. The Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MHE) at KRG has embarked on a project to develop a system for ranking the universities under their jurisdiction. The MHE wanted their ranking system to be modeled on other established university ranking systems. They studied other systems of academic rankings, considered the factors that goes into them systems and tried to create a similar system of providing data in order to issue such ranking reports. However, dissimilarities between the established academic system and that of the KRG necessitated modifying to the ranking system in order to provide a reliable and relevant ranking report. This study explains the steps involved in establishing a system for ranking academic performance of Kurdistan universities. It begins by reviewing literature about the established systems of academic ranking, and the factors that are included in their ranking systems. It then details the factors that typically considered into completing such ranking system and how the MHE attempted to modify some of them in order to produce a reliable ranking system of higher education in Kurdistan universities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 132 (12) ◽  
pp. 1097-1101 ◽  
Author(s):  
M T Kalcioglu ◽  
Y Ileri ◽  
O I Ozdamar ◽  
U Yilmaz ◽  
M Tekin

AbstractObjectiveThe top 100 physicians of otorhinolaryngology and head and neck surgery worldwide were investigated using the Google Scholar h-index.MethodAlthough there are various bibliometrics ranking systems that present the academic quantity and quality of scientists’ published articles, the h-index is the most popular and widely accepted. In this study, Google Scholar was used to search all the keywords involving all the subspecialties of otorhinolaryngology and head and neck surgery, with the aim of identifying as many physicians as possible. Obtaining the Google Scholar h-index and citations is not possible for scientists who do not have Google Scholar accounts. Thus, only those with Google Scholar accounts were included.ResultsThe average h-index of all 100 physicians enrolled in the study was 37.83, with a range of 25–81.ConclusionThe current study details the academic impact of otorhinolaryngology and head and neck surgery physicians worldwide based on the Google Scholar h-index.


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