2013/05/06 by Nicolás Robinson‐García, Robinson-García, Nicolás, Daniel Torres‐Salinas +5
Decision Sciences · Medicine · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Digital Libraries (cs.DL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Health and Medical Research Impacts #Higher Education Governance and Development #Psychology Research and Bibliometrics #scientometrics and bibliometrics research
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1305.1216
openalex publication_date 2013/05/06 · openalex created_date 2022/10/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The great importance international rankings have achieved in the research\npolicy arena warns against many threats consequence of the flaws and\nshortcomings these tools present. One of them has to do with the inability to\naccurately represent national university systems as their original purpose is\nonly to rank world-class universities. Another one has to do with the lack of\nrepresentativeness of universities' disciplinary profiles as they usually\nprovide a unique table. Although some rankings offer a great coverage and\nothers offer league tables by fields, no international ranking does both. In\norder to surpass such limitation from a research policy viewpoint, this paper\nanalyzes the possibility of using national rankings in order to complement\ninternational rankings. For this, we analyze the Spanish university system as a\nstudy case presenting the I-UGR Rankings for Spanish universities by fields and\nsubfields. Then, we compare their results with those obtained by the Shanghai\nRanking, the QS Ranking, the Leiden Ranking and the NTU Ranking, as they all\nhave basic common grounds which allow such comparison. We conclude that it is\nadvisable to use national rankings in order to complement international\nrankings, however we observe that this must be done with certain caution as\nthey differ on the methodology employed as well as on the construction of the\nfields.\n