Ranking on Michael’s Domain

Scholar-what?

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This morning, an email from ScholarGPS dropped into my inbox informing me that Your prolific publication record, the high impact of your work, and the outstanding quality of your scholarly contributions have placed you in the top 0.05% of all scholars worldwide according to the most recent 2024 ScholarGPS rankings. Is this some scam to inflate my ego first and then make me buy into some subscription service? I was Googling around, but it seems to be a legitimate endeavor. I am not clear why somebody thinks that there should be still another company collecting this kind of research metrics, and why universities would be buying their ScholarGPS Pro subscription, which is aimed at academic institutions and apparently the way they monetize their service. ScholarGPS was founded in 2022 and evaluates individual scholars, institutions and publications. I briefly checked their rankings, and the institutional rankings are - with a few exceptions - pretty in line with other well-known ranking systems. E.g., the University of Helsinki ranks 82nd , behind the Karolinska Institute (67), ETH Zürich (56) and the University of Copenhagen (54). The three highest ranked publications are all about technical advances in protein analysis (Lowry, Bradford and Laemmli). Their numbers for these three (235778, 208682 and 195947 as of April 7th, 2025) do not match with Scopus (273686, 233419, 220553), Web of Science (356029, 242982, 259225), or Google Scholar numbers (234173, 261986, 307492). Do they really do their own counting? They claim to use AI. I don’t think counting counts as AI, and for all that counts, AI is really bad at counting and other simple math ( https://x.com/yuntiandeng/status/1836114401213989366 ). What does this “top 0.05% of all scholars” actually mean? Not much if you do not know how big the pond is from where you are fishing. There is no precise definition of what a “scholar” is. Scopus and Web Science contain profiles for about 10 million unique authors. And 0.05% of these is 5000, which is still a large number. ScholarPro claims it has data about 30 million scholars and 15000 academic institutions. For all that it’s worth, I checked the other experts on the VEGF list , and the vast majority checks out as legitimate (#1 Napoleone Ferrara, #2 Kari Alitalo). They have broken up science into many subspecialties, and you can look at the ranked experts in each of these (e.g. angiogenesis or TGF . Although the categories sometimes appear random. Why are there VEGFs and TGFs, but not Angiopoietins?

Finland still safest country for travellers

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In the 2017 Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index , Finnland scored in the global comparison rank 33 (11 places lower than two years ago ). However, Finland managed to keep its top position in the safety and security category. When looking at the raw numbers, the reason for the drop in competitiveness is not so much a worsening of the Finnish performance, but the improved performance of other countries, including Sweden and many non-European countries like Mexico, Malaysia or the United Arabic Emirates. Spain, France and Germany placed 1st, 2nd and 3rd, respectively, in both the 2015 and 2017 comparisons.

University rankings (and how to manipulate them)

Mon, 29 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Whow. Helsinki University was again able to improve its position in the Shanghai Ranking and is now number 56. However, even the University’s own press release had kind of a gloomy tune as if this was the last blossom before the final decay. It is true that the basis of the current success has patiently been built by the researchers over the last decades. Nevertheless, when politicians now draw the conclusion that the cuts of the educational budget are responsible for this success, they are probably right.Perhaps the cuts actually did contribute to the surge in productivity: All the scientists that unexpectedly were suddenly unemployed obviously continued to work furiously on their current projects to get their current manuscripts ready for publication. Papers are the overwhelmingly dominant currency in the academic job market. And these unemployed scientists might publish faster than before since unemployed scientists have no teaching duties…However, more importantly, the Helsinki numbers of the individual Shanghai Ranking indicators for 2015 and 2016 differ significantly only the per capita academic performance (publications/number of academic staff) and the number of highly cited scientists. Since the job cuts at Helsinki Universities have been going on already for a while even before the massive cuts of this spring, it appears reasonable to claim, that the 56th position is partly due to the job cuts, which did influence directly and rapidly the number of academic staff.The Shanghai Ranking emphasizes research, whereas in other rankings, Helsinki has even been dropping. E.g. in the QS World University Rankings , Helsinki dropped from position 67 (2014/15) to 96 (2015/16). Between these two rankings, the QS team made “improvements” to their ranking system and these were almost exclusively responsible for the drop if you look at the data closely. They “normalized” the citation ratio per faculty according to the subject, and life science got badly punished by being a “high citation field”. Very simply put, a citation to a paper in Arts and Humanities now counts about 40 times as much as a citation to a paper in Life Science/Medicine. Each of the 5 big fields (Arts & Humanities, Engineering & Technology, Life Sciences & Medicine, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences & Management) contributes now equally with 20% to the final rating in the citation per faculty category (detailed explanation of the normalization from here: http://content.qs.com/qsiu/Faculty_Area_Normalization_-_Technical_Explanation.pdf).Why on earth do they punish a field for having a bigger impact? Papers in the humanities are not cited as much as papers in life science. Maybe this could be due to the fact that their average publication is not as relevant for their own field as is a life science publication for the life science field? I agree that there are cultural differences between fields, but who is to say how much is due to such cultural differences versus low quality or irrelevant research? Exactly that’s what QS World University Ranking’s did by making up “normalization” factors essentially claiming equal relevance.However, all such rankings are easily manipulated. E.g. the citation to faculty (member) ratio can easily improved by outsourcing services that were previously performed by faculty scientists (and that’s what Helsinki University is just doing at the moment). Similar to the impact factor for journals, university rankings are losing their relevance if the goal is to score high and not to excel at research and teaching ( Goodhart’s law : When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure).The Shanghai Ranking has been criticized much. It undervalues teaching since teaching performance doesn’t enter directly the calculation at all, and it favours big universities since 50% of the rating are based on sheer numbers which are not normalized to account for the size of the university. Nevertheless it it the only reproducible (and therefore scientific) dataset from the three big rankings ( https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-012-0801-y ) since both the QS and the Times Ranking rely heavily on opinion and reputation surveys, which are notoriously difficult to reproduce.What is the take-home message? Helsinki University is probably as good as it used to be during the last decade and the big fluctuations are just artifacts resulting from changed ranking methodologies or resulting from administrative adjustments to the financial realities brought upon us by the Finnish voters in the 2015 parliamentary elections.