An Informetric Analysis of Relationship between Open Access Presence and Ranking of African Universities

This study was conducted to determine the relationship between open access presence and ranking of African universities. It adopted descriptive informetric to examine open access presence of African countries using Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) and Research Gate scores (RGs) of the universities. Data was also extracted from the Journal Consortium (an African university ranking organisation) for metrics on African university ranking. Data on African open access presence was correlated with university rankings. Findings reveal that only twenty-four countries in Africa have records in DOAR and Research gate. Four of the countries (South Africa, Egypt, Kenya and Nigeria) contribute more over 85% of open access records in Africa and the same produced 68% of the top 100 universities in Africa. The study found a highly significant positive but moderate correlation between open access presence and ranking of African universities. It concludes that African universities need to review their science policy in line with open access initiative to enhance the visibility and ranking of the university globally.

Determining the Standard of Quality: Examining the Turkish University Ranking Systems According to the Berlin Principles

The increasing competitive environment arising from the commercialization and internationalization of higher education (HE) and the increasing influence of the liberal character of educational policies have led to the emergence of HE ranking systems which have become an inevitable part of HE with the effect they have created. The lack of unambiguous methodological processes is one of the oft-cited critical problems in the HE ranking system literature. These systems vary due to the particular methods they adopt in creating their ranking results. This variation requires a set of principles on how best to perform these rankings. The principles established under Berlin Principles in 2006 aimed to address this need. This study aims to determine to what extent Turkish ranking systems comply with the basic tenets determined in the Berlin Principles. The study was designed as a methodological assessment study and the data were obtained from the websites and printed and electronic publications related to Turkish ranking systems. The data obtained were scored according to an evaluation form consisting of the tenets set out in the Berlin Principles. The findings show that the majority of the Turkish university ranking systems were not designed to be fully compliant with the Berlin Principles and instead they evaluate HE institutions by their research approach and quality definitions.

Autoevaluación de la calidad con estándares internacionales. La Universidad Técnica de Manabí

El sistema de educación superior de Ecuador, desde hace tres décadas, ha vivido cambios significativos en sus procesos de evaluación de la calidad de las universidades, que se ven reflejados al contar con casi todas sus universidades acreditadas. En este contexto, el objetivo del estudio fue generar una propuesta para la autoevaluación de la calidad con estándares internacionales para la Universidad Técnica de Manabí, que responda a nuevos retos de alcance y proyección internacional. Se realizó un diseño metodológico mixto, combinando las metodologías cualitativa y cuantitativa. La fase cualitativa permitió la utilización del análisis histórico y documental, no interactivo, para identificar la evolución de los procesos de evaluación de la calidad en Ecuador. La fase cuantitativa permitió el estudio comparativo del Modelo de Evaluación Externa de Universidades y Escuelas Politécnicas 2019, con indicadores establecidos en el QS Latin American University Ranking, con lo que se generó la propuesta del modelo para la autoevaluación.

Does sustainability reporting promote university ranking? Australian and New Zealand evidence

Purpose This study aims to investigate the relationship between university rankings and sustainability reporting among Australia and New Zealand universities. Even though sustainability reporting is an established area of investigation, prior research has paid inadequate attention to the nexus of university ranking and sustainability reporting. Design/methodology/approach This study covers 46 Australian and New Zealand universities and uses a data set, which includes sustainability reports and disclosures from four reporting channels including university websites, and university archives, between 2005 and 2018. Ordinary least squares regression was used with Pearson and Spearman’s rank correlations to investigate the likelihood of multi-collinearity and the paper also calculated the variance inflation factor values. Finally, this study uses the generalized method of moments approach to test for endogeneity. Findings The findings suggest that sustainability reporting is significantly and positively associated with university ranking and confirm that the four reporting channels play a vital role when communicating with university stakeholders. Further, this paper documents that sustainability reporting through websites, in addition to the annual report and a separate environment report have a positive impact on the university ranking systems. Originality/value This paper contributes to extant knowledge on the link between university rankings and university sustainability reporting which is considered a vital communication vehicle to meet the expectation of the stakeholder in relevance with the university rankings.

Nurse education today: Between teaching and publication focus

“Publish or Perish” is no longer an imagination. On the contrary, it is considered a new reality in nursing education today. All nurse scholars, researchers, faculty members, and students are eager and compete with each other to publish their research works in academic journals. Success in this challenge brings personal benefits, especially for academic reputation and promotion, as well as organizational benefits, such as university ranking and sponsorship. However, despite the advantages of faculty publication, the pros and cons of this topic are on the rise. Therefore, this article aims to discuss the publication-related phenomenon in nursing education, followed by concerns and recommendations for consideration.

Sustainable Development at University of Pécs

Since 2016, the University of Pécs (UP) has participated in the UI GreenMetric World University Ranking. Thanks to its conscious, disciplined environmental ambitions and related achievements, UP has been able to move forward year after year in the ever-expanding rankings and in 2019 it has been ranked among the top 100 greenest universities in the world. UP believes that sustainability must be achieved not only in its operations and university-related services but also in the internal and external natural, social and economic environment associated with the university. UP presents its sustainable development efforts along the lines of achievements in the natural, social and economic environment and explores its future visions. UP stated its mission, that every useful practice, innovation, management in the environment tend to help sustainability and sustainable administration has to be encouraged, with the aid of education and science aiming to strengthen ecological consciousness. It was realized in the spirit of this mission, the development of the 24,8 billion HUF Modern Cities Programme for the built infrastructure of UP, the award of the title "Responsible Employer of the Year" in 2019, the award of the "Energy Efficient Institution" award as the first Hungarian university and the award of the Baranya County Environmental Prize was achieved. In the social and economic environment, as an Energy Efficiency Mentor organization, UP established the Baranya Virtual Power Plant Program in 2019, which, together with social and economic actors, saved 3.5 MW of energy in the South Transdanubian region of Hungary within 1 year. With the support of the Visegrad Fund, UP is trying to build a network of universities between the Visegrad countries and the universities of the Danube Region, where the fight against climate change will become even more effective by means of shaping attitudes. The University of Pécs intends to increase its environmental ambitions in the future

Taiwanese Higher Education in Times of Change: The Implications of the New Policy 2018

This paper explores the potential consequences of the Higher Education Sprout Project (hesp) announced by the Ministry of Education (moe) in March 2018. In the fast-changing global arena of higher education, the Taiwanese government is striving for excellence in the performance of its higher education. Together with other East Asian countries like Japan, Korea, and Singapore, Taiwan officially entered the competition of global university ranking in 2006 when the government initiated the first round of the Aim for Top University Project (atup). After two five-year atup rounds, moe reviewed the results and started to revise the policy. Consequently, hesp was proposed and implemented. In this paper, we explicate the context of changing higher education landscape in Taiwan since 1994, the year the most recent education reform started. The discussion then moves to the issues emerging from the nationwide atup project. During the ten years of atup, most Taiwanese universities were influenced by the directions the project established. However, there has been criticism of atup and its outcome was severely in question. After reviewing the atup, the hesp came out in 2018. We analyse the policy as well as address its potential influences on universities in Taiwan.

Identifying Mis-Configured Author Profiles on Google Scholar Using Deep Learning

Google Scholar has been a widely used platform for academic performance evaluation and citation analysis. The issue about the mis-configuration of author profiles may seriously damage the reliability of the data, and thus affect the accuracy of analysis. Therefore, it is important to detect the mis-configured author profiles. Dealing with this issue is challenging because the scale of the dataset is large and manual annotation is time-consuming and relatively subjective. In this paper, we first collect a dataset of Google Scholar’s author profiles in the field of computer science and compare the mis-configured author profiles with the reliable ones. Then, we propose an integrated model that utilizes machine learning and node embedding to automatically detect mis-configured author profiles. Additionally, we conduct two application case studies based on the data of Google Scholar, i.e., outstanding scholar searching and university ranking, to demonstrate how the improved dataset after filtering out the mis-configured author profiles will change the results. The two case studies validate the importance and meaningfulness of the detection of mis-configured author profiles.

Correlation between universities’ Altmetric Attention Scores and their performance scores in Nature Index, Leiden, Times Higher Education and Quacquarelli Symonds ranking systems

Objective: Altmetrics are claimed to measure the scientific, societal, educational, technological and economic impacts of science. They have some of these dimensions in common with university ranking and evaluating systems. Their results are, therefore, expected to be partially convergent with the systems’. Given the importance of the scientific and non-scientific impacts of science, this study investigated the correlations of universities’ altmetrics with their total and dimensional scores in Nature Index, Leiden, Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). Methodology: Following a correlational design, it explored an available sample of the universities commonly ranked in the systems in 2017. The data were collected from online documents using checklists and analysed by the Spearman correlation. As Altmetric Attention Score (ASS) is efficient in that it integrates several indicators into a single one, it was used as the proxy of the universities’ social performance. Findings: The universities showed significant positive correlations between their ASSs and their performance scores on the total and dimensional levels, except for industry income in THE, with an insignificant correlation, and proportion of collaborative publication less than 100 km. in Leiden, with an inverse correlation. The correlations ranged from weak to marginally strong. Conclusion: The positive relationships between the universities’ performance and ASSs signified that there existed some similarities in what they measured. However, they were of weak-to-marginally strong powers, implying that the metrics differed in what they measured. The findings contribute to the existing knowledge by providing some evidence of convergence between university-level altmetrics and university performances in various dimensions.

El índice de Malmquist y los efectos de la educación superior sobre la productividad nacional

Las instituciones de educación superior representan un elemento clave para el desarrollo de los individuos, mismo que se ve reflejado en el desarrollo económico y social de los países. Este trabajo da a conocer específicamente en qué ayuda la educación superior en determinadas áreas, y pone de manifiesto que problemas como la falta de inversión en este sector frenan la productividad, y el interés de investigar en el área. Lo anterior se cumple mediante la implementación del índice de Malmquist, al establecer comparaciones entre los 43 países que poseen universidades catalogadas dentro del World University Ranking para los años 2012, 2013 y 2014, y la formulación de un punto de referencia para ayudar a detectar qué áreas son oportunidades para mejorar y alcanzar mayor productividad.