Academic Performance vs. Academic Reputation

Abstract

Global ranking systems have mesmerized both the academia and the general public because they have quickly become an essential part of decision-making processes for various stakeholders. Today, many methodologies exist and each is fighting hard to become widely recognized by different stakeholders. In order to fully meet the needs of general public and prospective students, field and subject based rankings are now occupying the prime focus of researchers and policy-makers. Our aim was to take a closer look at the QS World University Rankings by subject. To realize this aim, we conducted a case study where we identified two subject areas – Mathematics and Medicine. For each area, we collected the official QS scores for three criteria: Academic Reputation, Citations per Paper, and H-index Citations. We wanted to examine whether the academic staff, who participate in QS Global Academic Survey (upon which the Academic Reputation QS Score is calculated), rank the universities according to their actual academic performance i.e. the number and the quality of published scientific papers. To realize our aims, we analyzed two datasets which contained the data of the 50 leading universities according to the 2014 rankings. Besides the officially available data provided by the QS, we obtained the leading journals in which each university publishes its papers (concerning the number of published papers) and bibliometric indicators which were used to characterize the reviewed journals. The obtained results show little correlation between the number of universities' papers/bibliometric quality of journals and the QS scores.