Abstract

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) or Shanghai Ranking is a de facto standard to determine the position of universities worldwide. Improving ranking positions has become the goal of universities and governments. No wonder therefore that the aggregation of universities in Spain is nowadays suggested as a means to raise the international profile of our university system. In this context, the goal of this study was to test two potential groupings, universities belongingto the same Autonomous Community and campuses of international excellence (CEIs), to determine the ARWU placement that would result. To compute the ARWU indicators of these possible groupings, we used the methodology developed in Docampo (2012b). The results of our analysis clearly show the difficulty of improving ranking positions by calculating the sum of aggregated institutions. As a matter of fact, the only way to place a university cluster from Spain in the top 100 would be to treat all of the Catalan universities as a single institution. The next best ranking for Spain would be achieved by the Habitat 5U (universities of Comunidad Valenciana), BKC (Barcelona and Politècnica de Catalunya) and VLC/Campus (Valencia and Politécnica de Valencia), CEIs which would lie in the 150-200 range.

Abstract

One of the products of Thomson-Reuters is the list of highly cited researchers, which became more important when it was incorporated into the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities. Scores on the Shanghai Ranking  HiCi indicator are related to the number of highly cited researchers (HCR) by university. In the 2013 edition, methodological changes have been made in listing highly cited authors. The main aim of this paper is to analyze these changes and the new HCR distribution by country. The paper also lists the new HCR from Spain. At the national level, Spain increased its global representation to 2.52% and at the institutional level 23 universities are scored on the HiCi indicator, helping to configure a new map of research excellence. The paper concludes with a preliminary assessment of the impact of the new lists on the position of Spain’s universities in the Shanghai ranking.