New research rankings just in
A new report by Toronto-based Higher Education Strategy Associates (HESA) suggests Concordia’s efforts to strengthen its national research standing are paying off. The university ranks ninth in the country in social sciences and humanities and 20th in natural sciences and engineering.
Released on August 29, Measuring Academic Research in Canada: Field-Normalized University Rankings 2012 attempts to remove biases and paint a more nuanced and accurate picture of the nation’s academic research landscape.
“We’re very pleased with these new rankings, which reveal that we are competing very well across many realms of research in humanities, arts and social sciences, but also in sciences and engineering,” says Vice-President, Research and Graduate Studies, Graham Carr. “The results demonstrate that we are getting closer to reaching our goal of becoming one of the top five comprehensive universities in Canada.”
HESA arrived at its rankings by normalizing both the H-index — a measure of researchers’ productivity and impact — and granting council monies. As a result, academics are judged against the norms of their own disciplines, rather than the apples-to-oranges comparisons inherent in traditional rankings.
“It always bothered me how poorly measured some of this is,” said Alex Usher, president of HESA and co-author of the report with Paul Jarvey. “It’s easy to misstate strengths when rankings favour [institutional] size and [publication] volume. But once you take all that bias out, some universities do a lot better — such as Guelph and Concordia.”
Raw publication counts, often used to rank university research strengths, is just one of the biases HESA’s rankings seeks to correct. As the report points out, adding up publications says nothing about their quality, and raw citation numbers don’t say whether those references are positive or negative. Similarly, research grant dollar amounts don’t reflect the wide disparity in capital needed in various fields. Universities researching high-energy physics, for example, would be overrepresented, as this field consumes vastly more money than, say, economics or political science research.
Instead, HESA gauges each institution’s ‘academic capital’ through a new set of metrics. They used a bibliometric measure in combination with a proprietary database they developed to correct for biases. Thus universities with strengths in a handful of disciplines that enjoy strong publication and citations cultures — such as physics and life sciences — don’t get a disproportionate boost in the rankings. In fact HESA’s study excluded medical schools altogether, as they don’t have a common way of distinguishing researchers from clinicians, making fair comparison impossible.
Related link:
• Measuring Academic Research in Canada: Field-Normalized University Rankings 2012