Topic summary
Shanghai Ranking
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Academic Ranking of World Universities.
Criticism
The ranking has been criticised for "relying too much on award factors" thus undermining the importance of quality of instruction and humanities. A 2007 paper published in the journal Scientometrics found that the results from the Shanghai rankings could not be reproduced from raw data using the method described by Liu and Cheng. A 2013 paper in the same journal finally showed how the Shanghai ranking results could be reproduced. In a report from April 2009, J-C. Billaut, D. Bouyssou and Ph. Vincke analyse how the ARWU works, using their insights as specialists of Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). Their main conclusions are that the criteria used are not relevant; that the aggregation methodology has a number of major problems; and that insufficient attention has been paid to fundamental choices of criteria.