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A comparative analysis of global and national university ranking systems

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Abstract

Recent interest towards university rankings has led to the development of several ranking systems at national and global levels. Global ranking systems tend to rely on internationally accessible bibliometric databases and reputation surveys to develop league tables at a global level. Given their access and in-depth knowledge about local institutions, national ranking systems tend to include a more comprehensive set of indicators. The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic comparison of national and global university ranking systems in terms of their indicators, coverage and ranking results. Our findings indicate that national rankings tend to include a larger number of indicators that primarily focus on educational and institutional parameters, whereas global ranking systems tend to have fewer indicators mainly focusing on research performance. Rank similarity analysis between national rankings and global rankings filtered for each country suggest that with the exception of a few instances global rankings do not strongly predict the national rankings.

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Notes

  1. There are many ranking systems published in the UK, predominantly by news media such as The Times, The Guardian, etc. The Complete University Guide, the only ranking not published by a news media organization, was selected for the present study.

  2. http://www.webometrics.info/sites/default/files/Ediciones_anteriores/Top%20500%20Webometrics%20Ranking%20of%20World%20Universities%20July%202012.xls.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. URAP Laboratory, Informatics Institute, Middle East Technical University, Üniversiteler Mah. Dumlupınar Blvd., Çankaya, 06800, Ankara, Turkey

    Murat Perit Çakır, Cengiz Acartürk, Oğuzhan Alaşehir & Canan Çilingir

  2. Industrial Engineering Department, Middle East Technical University, Üniversiteler Mah. Dumlupınar Blvd., Çankaya, 06800, Ankara, Turkey

    Canan Çilingir

Authors
  1. Murat Perit Çakır
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  2. Cengiz Acartürk
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  3. Oğuzhan Alaşehir
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  4. Canan Çilingir
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Murat Perit Çakır.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 13.

Table 13 Rank similarity (M) measures obtained for URAP 2000 and URAP 500 rankings
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Çakır, M.P., Acartürk, C., Alaşehir, O. et al. A comparative analysis of global and national university ranking systems. Scientometrics 103, 813–848 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1586-6

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