University Rankings and the Research Performance Index. (September 11, 2010)

A couple of days ago Ba Tuong Vo, Victor Sreeram,  and Ba.Ngu Vo, announced on the Web that they have ready for publication: "On the Assessment of University Research Impact: Towards Simplicity, Transparency and Fairness," Technical Report, The University of Western Australia, August 2010.

Their Website states:

In a nutshell, this website is for a  pilot study to benchmark the research output or performance of the world's top universities. The initial trial involves over 1000 universities and 5000 faculties.

 This project is all about promoting a move towards simplicity, transparency and fairness in the process of performance or impact assessment of university research.

 The proposed methodology produces what has been termed a research performance index or RPI for each university.

The intention of the developers of this system of ranking "is to contribute to the present discussion with the proposition of a new research performance index which is based on the h and g indices. The underlying principles of the proposed methodology are that it is based on direct and objective assessment criteria, considers only outputs, and is simple and transparent in formulation. In addition, the intended objectives for the resultant indices are that they can be easily understood and physically meaningful, calculated independently for the different faculties, and subsequently combined to produce an overall index which accounts equally for all faculties. The proposed methodology is trialled with a global sample of over 1000 well known universities covering over 5000 constituent faculties using publication and citation data from the Elsevier Scopus database".

In addition to the overall university rankings, rankings are given for five faculty groups which are accessible on their Website.

• MDPHS= Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacology, and Health Sciences
• PNMS= Pure, Natural, and Mathematical Sciences
• ECT= Engineering, Computing, and Technology
• LBAS= Life, Biological and Agricultural Sciences
• AHBSS= Arts, Humanities, Business, and Social Sciences

Comparable sub-groupings are given by the  Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the QS World University Rankings.

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The caption and table below illustrate the methodology used to obtain the values for the two indices, and see "Theory and practice of the g-index"  by Leo Egghe.

It is noteworthy that the authors base their rankings solely on manipulation of citation data obtained from the Elsevier Scopus database rather than the more complex assessments performed by the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the QS World University Rankings. As a consequence the rankings obtained near the top of the rankings e.g. the top 10, are not dissimilar from those of  SJTU and QSUWR. However they can differ markedly further down the rankings.

_{Here are the rankings for the Group of Eight Universities according to the three systems. With the exception of ANU and UNSW, RPI's rankings fit more closely with those given by SJTU.}

The rankings for Australia's 39 universities and the world's top 50 according to the Research Performance Index:

Australian Universities	World's Top 50 Universities

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