Authors and Authority in Rankings

        Data collection for the January edition (to be published in the early days of February 2014) already started, so it is time to make a few considerations about the quality and usefulness of this new edition of the Ranking Web. There are several University Rankings that intend to provide a global coverage of the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) from all over the world. Unfortunately most of them only covers a fraction (less than 5%) of the HEIs and even for these with a strong research-mission bias. These are concerns (shortcomings) that have been already cited in the now abundant literature about the ranking topics, but there are other issues that are frequently overlooked.        Most of the papers comment about the rankings' methodology, unfortunately only for cutting and pasting the Methods section of the rankings without offering any further analysis. This is especially worrisome as even the cited sections are not providing any supporting evidence for the variables or the weightings chosen and there is a lack of published papers explaining in detail such options on a scientific basis with empirical background. And the main reason is that many of these rankings are anonymous, without clear indication of the name of the main author. When the author is mentioned it is easy to check his/her authority level using the academic standard procedure, the total numbers of citations of his/her papers (or the h-index) in internationally recognized peer-reviewed journals.

        Today that exercise is pretty easy thanks to Google Scholar Citations, a universally free available database with the largest bibliometric coverage of any academic database in the world. For example, you can easily check the impact of the scientific activity of the main editor of the Ranking Web here: