Shanghai Jiao Tong World Ranking 2009

2009 Shanghai Jiao Tong University League Table just published….

The latest SJTU rankings for 2009 have now been published.

Harvard is again top as in 2007 and 2008, and Cambridge remains in 4th position and top from the UK. Top 20 as follows:

1 Harvard University
2 Stanford University
3 University of California – Berkeley
4 University of Cambridge
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
6 California Institute of Technology
7 Columbia University
8 Princeton University
9 University of Chicago
10 University of Oxford
11 Yale University
12 Cornell University
13 University of California – Los Angeles
14 University of California – San Diego
15 University of Pennsylvania
16 University of Washington – Seattle
17 Univ Wisconsin – Madison
18 University of California – San Francisco
19 Johns Hopkins University
20  Tokyo University

Note that the Top 18 are identical to 2008.

UK universities appear in the top 100 as follows (change from last year in brackets):

4 Cambridge (no change)
10 Oxford (no change)
21 UCL (up 1)
26 Imperial (down 1)
41 Manchester (down 1)
53 Edinburgh (up 2)
61 Bristol (no change)
65 King’s London (up 16)
81 Sheffield (down 4)
83 Nottingham (down 1)
94= Birmingham (down 3)

No other UK institutions feature in the Shanghai Jiao Tong world 100.

Special Collections as Laboratories

Special Collections as Laboratories

Interesting post from the Chronicle of Higher Education

It’s a report on a recent forum which looked at the opportunities for using special collections to teach students about the possibilities and principles of research: “Such collections should be put to use as laboratories where students work hands-on with primary documents, incorporate them into original research projects, and even publish the results in institutional repositories.”

Panelists at a session on “An Age of Discovery: Special Collections in the Digital Age” — part of the Coalition for Networked Information’s fall forum, held in tandem with the membership meeting of the Association of Research Libraries — laid out case studies of what can happen when you turn undergraduates loose in special collections. Barbara Rockenbach, director of undergraduate and library education at Yale University Library, described how students in an urban-studies course, “The Mediated City,” created annotated digital city guides as part of their class work. In a history class, “Otherwise Engaged: Intellectuals, Politics, Education,” undergraduates created online narrative exhibits that illustrated specific moments in time.

“What we discovered is that you set high expectations, and the students tend to live up to them,” Ms. Rockenbach said. She also pointed out that it’s easier to justify the resources your special collections eat up if those collections aren’t just sitting there gathering dust.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, students take part in the Ethnography of the University Initiative, creating research projects that investigate campus history and culture. Sarah L. Shreeves, coordinator of Illinois’s Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (Ideals), talked about how the student ethnographers work through the full circle of scholarly communication, beginning with original research and ending with the chance to deposit their work in the Ideals institutional repository alongside the work of other students and faculty members.

Interesting ideas.

Most Cited Institutions: 1999-2009

A league table of the most cited institutions 1999-2009 has been published by ScienceWatch.com

The list is dominated by US universities with 14 entries and only three UK entries and one each from Germany, Canada and Japan. Harvard is, inevitably, top:

These institutions all produce a high volume of papers resulting in extremely high citation counts—the top six institutions have over one million citations to their credit, and cite counts for the remaining 14 are all well over a half-million.

Perhaps not that startling a table but nevertheless interesting

1 HARVARD UNIV
2 MAX PLANCK SOCIETY
3 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV
4 UNIV WASHINGTON
5 STANFORD UNIV
6 UNIV CALIF LOS ANGELES
7 UNIV MICHIGAN
8 UNIV CALIF BERKELEY
9 UNIV CALIF SAN FRANCISCO
10 UNIV PENN
11 UNIV TOKYO
12 UNIV CALIF SAN DIEGO
13 UNIV TORONTO
14 UCL
15 COLUMBIA UNIV
16 YALE UNIV
17 MIT
18 UNIV CAMBRIDGE
19 UNIV OXFORD
20 UNIV WISCONSIN

The listing of the top 20 institutions which attracted the highest total citations to their papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals over all 22 fields in the database. These institutions are the top 20 out of a pool of 4,050 institutions comprising the top 1% ranked by total citation count over all fields.

More details are on the website.

Ig Nobel awards

This year’s Ig Nobel awards

Report in the Guardian about this year’s Ig Nobel awards. A couple are rather good:

Veterinary medicine prize
Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson at Newcastle University’s school of agriculture share the award for the groundbreaking discovery that giving cows names such as Daisy increases their milk yield. “It’s the highlight of my career,” said Douglas. “The work amused the public, but it addressed a serious issue about the welfare of animals and points to an easy way to improve yields by reducing stress in cattle.”

Mathematics prize
Awarded to Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple way of dealing with a wide range of numbers. Gono ordered his bank to print notes with denominations ranging from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars.

The one about police in Ireland misreading Polish driving licences must be a joke though. Fuller details and references are on the improbable research site.

Futurity.org: promoting university research

Futurity.org

Futurity.org has just launched (September 2009) – it is a consortium led by Duke University, Stanford University, and the University of Rochester and aims to highlight the latest discoveries from leading universities in the United States and Canada:

Futurity aggregates the very best research news. The site, which is hosted at the University of Rochester, covers news in the environment, health, science, society, and other areas.

Why Futurity? Why now?
The way people share information is changing quickly and daily. Blogs and social media sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are just a taste of what’s to come. It will be easier than ever to share content instantly with people around the globe, allowing universities to reach new audiences and engage a new generation in discovery.

Equally significant has been the recent decline in science and research coverage by traditional news outlets. For decades, universities have partnered with journalists to communicate their work to the public, but that relationship is evolving. At the same time, research universities are among the most credible and trusted institutions in society, and now have the ability to deliver their news and information directly to readers without barriers or gatekeepers.

In an increasingly complex world, the public needs access to clear, reliable research news. Futurity does the work of gathering that news. Think of it as a snapshot of where the world is today and where it’s headed tomorrow. Discover the future.

Ambitious stuff. It’s still early days for this site but it does look extremely promising. And is there anything similar in the UK? Research TV, now no more, had a similar kind of aspiration.

Impact of the Budget on higher education

Savings needed? No need to think about it, just cut the administration.

John Denham has written to HEFCE on the impact of the Budget.

This is a significant letter from the Secretary of State but it doesn’t quite say what the Guardian is reporting. The paper’s headline states: “Universities told to cut admin costs, not teaching or research”. This isn’t precisely the message but the sentiments are there:

Ministers have calmed fears that universities will be asked to axe thousands of academic jobs and make savings on teaching and research.
Letters from the universities secretary, John Denham, to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) and the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) confirm that savings should be made in administration costs, rather than the core university business of teaching and research.

“I am confident that we can find efficiency savings whilst protecting the quality of teaching and research,” he wrote.

Savings should come from programmes that “do not directly contribute to the frontline delivery of teaching and research”, he added.

The important point here is that, having determined that universities have to make significant savings it really isn’t the job of the Secretary of State to tell institutions how to prioritise their spending. Of course institutions will not seek to undermine quality of teaching and research. But the idea that there is this huge unnecessary raft of administration from which savings can easily be made, that this will have no effect on quality and also that that somehow administrators are dispensable is simplistic and thoroughly misguided.

So, universities will find their own ways to make the savings required and will, it is to be hoped, aim to do so in a measured and sensible way. But this kind of advice is not hugely helpful.

VCs protest: what do we want? Higher fees!

When do we want them? Er, as soon as possible really but it is recognised that there might be the tiny problem of electoral arithmetic to contend with, so bad luck everyone.

The BBC has done a survey of a selection of VCs on their fee preferences:

Many universities in England and Wales want a sharp increase in tuition fees, a survey by BBC News has concluded. Two thirds of vice chancellors, speaking anonymously, said they needed to raise fees, suggesting levels of between £4,000 and £20,000 per year. More than half of university heads want students to pay at least £5,000 per year or for there to be no upper limit.

Higher Education Minister David Lammy said there was an “important debate to be had”. The National Union of Students has warned of debts of £32,000 for students if fees rise to £7,000 per year.

There is an important debate to be had on this issue. Universities do need substantially more money to deliver (a) the teaching and learning students deserve and (b) the world leading science base expected by government. Even before the global recession things were looking a bit dodgy on the long term funding front. Now universities are likely to be so far down the pecking order you might expect the Treasury to be arguing for topping up Fred Goodwin’s pension before investing more in higher education. So where else is the money going to come from?

RAE 2008: Results and rankings

RAE 2008 results are now out (effective 18 December 2008)

Many, many ways to calculate rankings from the data but arguably the most authoritative and convincing one comes from Research Fortnight:

Research Fortnight Power Rankings 2008

1 Oxford
2 Cambridge
3 UCL
4 Manchester
5 Edinburgh
6 Imperial
7 Nottingham
8 Leeds
9 Sheffield
10 Bristol
11 King’s College
12 Birmingham
13 Southampton
14 Glasgow
15 Warwick
16 Cardiff
17 Newcastle
18 Liverpool
19 Durham
20 Queen Mary

The Times Higher rankings can be found here. They are using a Grade Point Average (ie no direct indication of volume). The Guardian’s calculations are here. Not very different from THE and using GPA again which shows excellent performance for institutions with slightly smaller strong submissions including Essex, Warwick and York. All of the tables show a very good improvement by Queen Mary in particular but also Nottingham.

Other analysis is awaited…