Academic Ranking of World Universities

The Shanghai ranking is a global university ranking, which the Shanghai Jiaotong University carried out since 2003.

Thousand colleges are audited annually worldwide, the first five hundred are listed in a list. The current list of currently published on 15 August 2013.

• 2.1 Top Ten (2013 )

Methodology

The universities are compared on the basis of six indicators. Focus of the rating is research. Be considered: the number of scientific publications and the number of citations, which are used as sources two statistics of the U.S. media conglomerate Thomson Reuters, the journals Nature and Science, and the Web of Science of the Institute for Scientific Information evaluate exclusively, also in the natural sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in mathematics and the prestigious Field medal. As an indicator of performance in general, the size of the institution is considered.

For each indicator, the best university, the value 100 is assigned to the following universities will receive a percentage of it.

Indicators

Result

Among the first 20 universities to 2013 only three non -US universities: Cambridge ( 5th place), Oxford (No. 10) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ranked 20). This is thus the first German-language university; the first German university (Technical University Munich ) can be found at number 50 became the first Austrian university, the University of Vienna is located in the square ex aequo 151 to 200 total, 53 German, Swiss and seven five Austrian universities are in the ranking.

Top Ten (2013 )

Criticism

Criticisms that were different from the Centre for Higher Education Development, a competitor in the field of university rankings, raised concern the following aspects:

• Due to the long observation periods historical and current research performance are mixed. So Nobel Prizes are taken into account by the year 1911. This powerful start-up companies are disadvantaged in particular.

• The heavy weight of journal articles in Web of Science has a bias in favor of universities with scientific alignment in English-speaking countries result. Publications in other media and other languages ​​are not considered, which excludes excellence in the humanities of the standings.

• Specifics of the national higher education systems are hardly taken into account. So, for example, the non-university research in Germany with their Max Planck institutes or the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft disregarded. A particularly grotesque example is the absolute top university in Italy, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, which allows only a small number of students ( in the academic year 2011/12 57 new admissions ) on the basis of a rigorous entrance competition and only on account of their small size places 301-400 is far outstripped by other Italian universities.

• In the journal Scientometrics Razvan V. Florian could not reproduce the results of the Shanghai rankings based on the methodology specified by Liu and Cheng.