OCTOBER 9 — I would like to comment on the demands that Malaysian universities participate in the Times Higher Education, (THE) World University Rankings, the data for which is supplied by Thomson Reuters (TR).

First, it must be admitted that Malaysian universities need improvement, especially in research.

Second, it is true that improvement is likely to come only through competition and international comparison.

There are, however, several accurate, detailed and reliable resources available from the Scimago Lab, the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University  and the Cybermetrics Lab, among other, that provide sound data about research, citations, innovation and web presence and activities.

The Scimago rankings, for example, have information on the comparative performance of universities and other institutions on 13 indicators. From these, you could learn, among other things, that Universiti Malaya is ranked 309^th in the world for research output up from 810^th in 2009, that its ranking for quality of research, measured by normalised impact, is very low although improving recently, that it does well (263^rd and rising) for innovative knowledge and quite well for web visibility. There is no need to resort to THE to get this sort of data to compare performance with other universities.

It is true that the THE rankings have a section that is supposed to be about teaching but that consists of a group of five indicators of little or no relevance to the teaching of undergraduates, including a reputation survey of postgraduate supervision and two indicators based on the number of doctoral students. Nor do they have anything that measures the quality of graduates.

Universiti Malaya and other Malaysian universities should think very carefully about getting involved with the THE rankings for the following reasons.

They are very unstable because of the prominence given to two reputation surveys where a few votes can contribute to large falls and rises, because universities can opt in and opt out, sometimes pushing other universities down the charts or out of them even if their scores are unchanged, and because the citations indicator can be influenced by contributions to a handful of massively cited papers, some of them with literally thousands of authors in physics, medicine or genetics.

It requires a lot of work that will probably end up being done by staff with research and writing skills that could be better used elsewhere.

Participation in the THE rankings could encourage university administrators to try to influence them by pushing students into doctoral programmes for which they are unprepared, by reducing the number of faculty, by transferring research funds between faculties to get the highest scores, by recruiting researchers just for their names on massive global research projects, all of which can boost scores for various indicators.

Above all, it would be unwise for a university that is striving for intellectual and academic rigour to be associated with rankings that are so flawed methodologically that they have various times  awarded Alexandria University, Moscow State Engineering Physics Institute and Panjab University unbelievably high places.

The most recent edition of the rankings saw the publication of more ludicrous results. Federico Santa Maria Technical University of Valparaiso, Chile is the fourth “best” university in Latin America and the sixth “best” in the world for research influence. Scuola Normale Superior in Pisa is the  “best“ in Italy. Turkish universities are zooming up the charts leaving Egyptian, Israeli, Iranian and Saudi institutions in the Middle East dust.

The one possible advantage of joining the THE rankings is that they have prestige. They do get a great deal of publicity from administrators and bureaucrats who know little about rankings. Those who are knowledgeable about rankings and bibliometrics such as Alex Usher of the Canadian Higher Education Strategy Associates and Isidro Aguillo of the Cybermetrics Lab are less enchanted.

It might be better for UM, USM and other Malaysian universities to focus on the Shanghai rankings where UM is now in the 301 to 400 band and USM is in the 401 to 500 band. These rankings may not be prestigious and may even be a bit boring but they are stable and reliable.

**This is the personal opinion of the writer and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail Online.