A new university rankings system based on one of the world\u2019s most comprehensive databases of university performance has demonstrated the inherent flaws in league tables that rank universities in simple numerical order.<\/p>\n
The new ranking, released today by Curtin University\u2019s Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) and included in a research paper published in the Journal eLife<\/em>, is one of the first to show the reliability of ranking scores and draws on an immense database sourced from across the world.<\/p>\n Lead author Dr Karl Huang, from COKI, said the Index sets the scene for a fresh conversation about how universities collaborate and give back to their communities.<\/p>\n \u201cEach year, the release of a range of university rankings provokes significant debate about the relevance and value of each ranking system, but these rankings have become highly influential over the past two decades, impacting on student recruitment and university strategy,\u201d Dr Huang said.<\/p>\n \u201cOur paper developed an index of the top 100 universities in terms of open access performance, assessing the reliability of the score for each institution. We found that universities can\u2019t be easily ranked from best to worst with a simplistic league table.<\/p>\n \u201cThis new ranking highlights deep flaws in our reliance on existing league tables as dependable measures of how good each university is.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr Huang said that no score is perfect, but we can estimate how precise the score for each university, and therefore the rank position, is.<\/p>\n \u201cSimple rankings have always been misleading and what our statistical work shows is just how much of an issue that is,\u201d Dr Huang said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can measure a performance for each university, but statistically speaking many in the top 100 are not different from each other. What this means it that the question of which university is at the top, or whether university A is one position above university B is meaningless.\u201d<\/p>\n Co-author Professor Cameron Neylon, the co-lead of COKI, said the findings have serious implications for many other league tables, which have not addressed the issue of variability in the measures they use.<\/p>\n \u201cWhole continents are largely ignored by current league tables, which raises questions about the measures currently relied upon to decide whether a university is doing its\u2019 job,\u201d Professor Neylon said.<\/p>\n \u201cExamining data across a much wider range of measures, drawing in statistics from around the world will help redefine the impact and role of universities in the 21st<\/sup> century.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A new university rankings system as demonstrated the inherent flaws in league tables that rank universities in simple numerical order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4001,"featured_media":12325,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_research-areas":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"research-areas":[],"class_list":["post-19608","media-release","type-media-release","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research"],"acf":{"post_options":{"":null,"additional_content":{"title":"","content":"","image":false},"related_courses":false,"credits":{"author":"","photographer":"","media":false},"display_author":true,"banner":{"image":false}}},"featured_image":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/library-869061_1920-resized-for-web-1000x500.jpg","author_meta":{"first_name":"Lauren","last_name":"Glaskin","display_name":"Lauren Sydoruk"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media-release\/19608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media-release"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/media-release"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media-release\/19608\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19608"},{"taxonomy":"research-areas","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-areas?post=19608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}