Skip to main content
Log in

Comprehensive world university ranking based on ranking aggregation

  • Original paper
  • Published:
Computational Statistics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Many university rankings have been proposed in recent decades. The remarkable divergence among various rankings leads to confusion for decision-makers. In this paper, we propose to generate a comprehensive world university ranking by aggregating existing individual university rankings. We present a new graph-based rank aggregation method by defining a competition graph of universities, in which each node represents a university and each directed edge represents an outranking relation between two universities. We propose to measure the quality of a university by the out-in degree ratio based on which we rank all universities. Moreover, We evaluate the effectiveness of our comprehensive world university ranking from the perspectives of normality and impartiality, respectively. It is shown that the aggregated ranking will be applied as a blend integrating all the information from individual university rankings and can efficiently eliminate the outliers and regional partiality as a “smoother”.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Bastedo MN, Bowman NA (2011) College rankings as an interorganizational dependency: establishing the foundation for strategic and institutional accounts. Res High Educ 52(1):3–23

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bougnol ML, Dulá JH (2015) Technical pitfalls in university rankings. High Educ 69(5):859–866

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bowman NA, Bastedo MN (2009) Getting on the front page: organizational reputation, status signals, and the impact of us news and world report on student decisions. Res High Educ 50(5):415–436

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Buela-Casal G, Gutiérrez-Martínez O, Bermúdez-Sánchez MP, Vadillo-Muñoz O (2007) Comparative study of international academic rankings of universities. Scientometrics 71(3):349–365

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Çakır MP, Acartürk C, Alaşehir O, Çilingir C (2015) A comparative analysis of global and national university ranking systems. Scientometrics 103(3):813–848

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chen YL, Cheng LC, Hsu WY (2013) A new approach to the group ranking problem: finding consensus ordered segments from users’ preference data. Decis Sci 44(6):1091–1119

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cook WD, Kress M (1990) A data envelopment model for aggregating preference rankings. Manag Sci 36(11):1302–1310

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dill DD, Soo M (2005) Academic quality, league tables, and public policy: a cross-national analysis of university ranking systems. High Educ 49(4):495–533

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Docampo D (2013) Reproducibility of the Shanghai academic ranking of world universities. Scientometrics 94(2):567–587

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Griffith A, Rask K (2007) The influence of the us news and world report collegiate rankings on the matriculation decision of high-ability students: 1995–2004. Econ Educ Rev 26(2):244–255

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hazelkorn E (2007) The impact of league tables and ranking systems on higher education decision making. High Educ Manag Policy 19(2):1–24

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Huang MH (2011) A comparison of three major academic rankings for world universities: from a research evaluation perspective. J Libr Inf Stud 9(1):1–25

    Google Scholar 

  • Ioannidis JP, Patsopoulos NA, Kavvoura FK, Tatsioni A, Evangelou E, Kouri I, Contopoulos-Ioannidis DG, Liberopoulos G (2007) International ranking systems for universities and institutions: a critical appraisal. BMC Med 5(1):1

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kerr C (2001) The uses of the university. Harvard University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Langville AN, Meyer CD (2012) Who’s# 1?: the science of rating and ranking. Princeton, Princeton University Press

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Moed HF (2017) A critical comparative analysis of five world university rankings. Scientometrics 110(2):967–990

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pavel AP (2015) Global university rankings: a comparative analysis. Procedia Econ Finance 26:54–63

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pedings KE, Langville AN, Yamamoto Y (2012) A minimum violations ranking method. Optim Eng 13(2):349–370

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Reilly B (2002) Social choice in the south seas: electoral innovation and the Borda count in the Pacific Island countries. Int Political Sci Rev 23(4):355–372

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Robinson-Garcia N, Torres-Salinas D, Herrera-Viedma E, Docampo D (2019) Mining university rankings: publication output and citation impact as their basis. Res Eval 28(3):232–240

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Safón V (2013) What do global university rankings really measure? The search for the x factor and the x entity. Scientometrics 97(2):223–244

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Saisana M, d’Hombres B, Saltelli A (2011) Rickety numbers: volatility of university rankings and policy implications. Res Policy 40(1):165–177

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Salmi J, Saroyan A (2007) League tables as policy instruments. High Educ Manag Policy 19(2):1–38

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sorz J, Wallner B, Seidler H, Fieder M (2015) Inconsistent year-to-year fluctuations limit the conclusiveness of global higher education rankings for university management. PeerJ 3:e1217

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sponsler BA (2009) The role and relevance of rankings in higher education policymaking. Institute for Higher Education Policy, Washington, DC

    Google Scholar 

  • Usher A, Savino M (2007) A global survey of university ranking and league tables. High Educ Europe 32(1):5–15

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Van Raan AF (2005) Fatal attraction: conceptual and methodological problems in the ranking of universities by bibliometric methods. Scientometrics 62(1):133–143

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

Jun Wu acknowledges the Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 71871217 and the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province under Grant No. 2019JJ20019. Xin Lu acknowledges the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 71522014, 71771213, 71790615, and 91846301.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jun Wu.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary material 1 (pdf 398 KB)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Zhang, Y., Xiao, Y., Wu, J. et al. Comprehensive world university ranking based on ranking aggregation. Comput Stat 36, 1139–1152 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00180-020-01033-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00180-020-01033-8

Keywords

Navigation