Hi My name is universityranking watcher and Im interested in world university rankings. Today, many university rankings especially made from UK are severely biased and problematic.
Why is it problematic?
Since first world univ rankings made from shanghai jiatong university UK started to join the rang king job. However unlike sjtu's rankings british world univ rankings were produced from a commercial institution and they brought many problems.
1. Subjective opinion polls
Many british ranking editors used to say that their peer review scores are reliable because academician numbers are big enough to give us true values of each university
However there are fundamental problems they missed.
"Do academicians truly know well about each university IN THE WORLD?"
Dont get the wrong idea!
Academicians are the people who are good at their professional knowledge and research. They are NOT the people who know every single university in the world.
Dont think that a professor can visit each university all around the world because now there are more than 20,000 universities in 6 continents!!
Thus, the only reason academicians know about some other institutions is because they saw papers the institutions made. They are able to evaluate other universities only with each university's articles because they can not see the research facilities of every single university and can not meet every professor living in so many different countries and can not take other universities classes.
Consequently, these facts make us questions about the usefulness and the true meaning of peer review scores. Based on the facts We can easily conclude that ranking editors can simply replace their peer review scores with citation performances.
Even this solution , the editors are still sticking to using subjective opinion polls.
Furthermore the compiled results are not understandable. Look at this