Rankings are what you make of them – or don’t

The CWTS Leiden research ranking is state of art, so why aren’t Uni SA and Griffith U trumpeting to the skies their achievement in maths and computer science publications? Ethics and accuracy probably.

Sure, they rate one and two in the world, ahead of Princeton and Stanford universities, for the proportion of publications staff wrote/collaborated on for 2014 -2017  that are in the top 10 per cent for the field.

But a Uni SA researcher (via Twitter) shows that Griffith U is in top spot for 35 top papers out of 154 publications, Uni SA for 39 from 172.  Good-o, but Princeton is just 1 per cent behind – with 141 top ten per cents from 647 papers and Stanford U has 203 from 949.