Job Discussion Forums

[coder]

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[plumpy nut]

For U.S. Universities, I think I'll stick with the U.S. News and World Report.

[D.E.C.]

What criteria are used for ranking the universities?

[nomad soul]

[LPKSA]

I'm sorry, but having taught in two "reputable" universities in China, and seeing how acceptable plagiarism is within Chinese institutions, and seeing how the administrative departments of different colleges in China seem to be okay with plagiarism (I was told by a dean of one department that 'this is China, it's collective learning'), I also think I'll stick with a U.S. or other western based institution reports. I mean, in China, one can simply purchase publishing rights. You can simply pay to be published. No effort involved whatsoever. I know because I taught Chinese scholars. It happens all the time.

[coder]

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[mashkif]

[LPKSA]

[coder]

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[nomad soul]

Citations for sale: UC Berkeley professor critiques Saudi university's recruitment process of world's top researchers
By Megan Messerly, The Daily Californian | December 5, 2014
Source: http://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/05/citations-sale/

The U.S. News and World Report rankings have long been regarded as the Bible of university reputation metrics. But when the outlet released its first global rankings in October, many were surprised. UC Berkeley, which typically hovers in the twenties in the national pecking order, shot to third in the international arena. The university also placed highly in several subjects, including first place in math.

Even more surprising, though, was that a little-known university in Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz University, or KAU, ranked seventh in the world in mathematics — despite the fact that it didn’t have a doctorate program in math until two years ago. “I thought this was really bizarre,” said UC Berkeley math professor Lior Pachter. “I had never heard of this university and never heard of it in the context of mathematics.” As he usually does when rankings are released, Pachter received a round of self-congratulatory emails from fellow faculty members. He, too, was pleased that his math department had ranked first. But he was also surprised that his school had edged out other universities with reputable math departments, such as MIT, which did not even make the top 10.

It was enough to inspire Pachter to conduct his own review of the newly minted rankings. His inquiry revealed that KAU had aggressively recruited professors from a list of top scientists with the most frequently referenced papers, often referred to as highly cited researchers. “The more I’ve learned, the more shocked and disgusted I’ve been,” Pachter said.

Citations are an indicator of academic clout, but they are also a crucial metric used in compiling several university rankings. There may be many reasons for hiring highly cited researchers, but rankings are one clear result of KAU’s investment. The worry, some researchers have said, is that citations and, ultimately, rankings may be KAU’s primary aim. KAU did not respond to repeated requests for comment via phone and email for this article.

On Halloween, Pachter published his findings about KAU’s so-called “highly-cited researcher program” in a post on his blog. It elicited many responses from his colleagues in the comment section, some of whom had experience working with KAU. UC Davis professor Jonathan Eisen also contacted Pachter.

Almost a year ago, Eisen had been solicited by KAU but ultimately declined the offer. Most researchers, such as Eisen, were initially contacted by KAU via email and asked if they would like to join the university’s faculty as a “distinguished adjunct professor.” Eisen traded emails with several people at KAU, trying to figure out what the catch was. “I tried to get them to explain what they were trying to do,” Eisen said. “It smelled really off.” KAU offered him $72,000 per year and free business-class airfare and five-star hotel stays for him to visit KAU in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, according to an email sent to Eisen by KAU. In exchange, Eisen was told he would be expected to work on collaborations with KAU local researchers and also update his Thomson Reuters’ highly cited researcher listing to include a KAU affiliation. He would also be expected to occasionally publish some scientific journal articles with the Saudi university’s name attached.

Other former and current KAU adjuncts reported being contacted in the same way and offered similar contracts. “I’ve been offered money to be a visiting scientist somewhere and even done that occasionally,” Eisen said. “But they don’t come out and say, ‘We want to list your name as one of our faculty members.’ ”

In 2011, Science magazine published an article titled “Saudi Universities Offer Cash in Exchange for Academic Prestige,” questioning KAU’s efforts to enhance its international standing through this program. In response, Adnan Zahed, KAU’s vice president for graduate studies, submitted a letter to the magazine, defending the program. “KAU is definitely not buying research publications for the sake of ranking,” Zahed said in the letter. “KAU would never sacrifice its reputation in order to obtain false rewards; neither would the elite scientists collaborating with the institution accept such an unethical proposition.”

On its website, KAU says the goal of hiring widely published professors is to “encourage and enhance its multidisciplinary research programs” and “initiate strong collaborations with other leading institutions around the globe.” The program was piloted in spring 2010 in the math department and was later extended to other disciplines. About 130 researchers — spanning the globe from Hong Kong to the Netherlands to the United States — list KAU as a secondary affiliation on Thomson Reuters’ highly cited researcher database. That figure is four times higher than that of Harvard University, which has the next highest number of secondary affiliations: 32.

Four UC Berkeley researchers list KAU affiliations, but only two have active adjunct professorships with the university: plant and microbial biology professor Chris Somerville and mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang. Somerville, a highly cited researcher, began his adjunct professorship with KAU early this year. Since then, he said he has helped KAU researchers with a grant proposal. He was supposed to travel to KAU earlier this year but said that, for one reason or another, it never worked out. When asked what he would do if it turned out that KAU had hired him only for his citations, Somerville said he had “started wondering about it” but was not sure. Zhang declined to comment, saying he didn’t want to “spoil” his newly formed relationship with KAU.

Other former KAU adjuncts report similar experiences to Somerville’s. They communicated with KAU researchers and drafted proposals, and many never heard back. Those former adjuncts view the program as an honest effort to establish international research collaborations, but one that ultimately fails in practice. Maarten Chrispeels, a professor emeritus at UCSD, was an adjunct professor at KAU for just one year. While under contract, he traveled to Saudi Arabia and submitted a research proposal for KAU researchers to sequence the genome of desert plants. But he never received a response from KAU about the proposal. Chrispeels said his contract was terminated at the end of the year. He believes that KAU was only interested in hiring him because of his ranking on the 2001 highly cited researcher list and that they may have terminated the contract after realizing he was no longer publishing out of his UCSD lab. “The program was OK, but from that point of view, this is not the way you go about developing science in a developing country,” Chrispeels said. “It’s my feeling that it is the way you raise your numbers.”

But Manolis Dermitzakis, an active KAU adjunct professor and University of Geneva Medical School professor, believes KAU has started terminating contracts of adjunct professors not because researchers haven’t appended enough KAU affiliations to their articles but rather because they are not visiting the university frequently enough or have not helped write grants. He does agree, though, that KAU has not approached the recruitment of adjuncts in the best way. “The key problem is that the way the Saudis have approached people was not elegant,” Dermitzakis said in an email. “To me this is mainly a problem of them not fully understanding how the scientific community works due to isolation.”

In addition to its seventh-place math ranking in the new U.S. News and World Report global ranking, KAU also ranked 10th in math in the Academic Ranking of World Universities, or ARWU. Back in 2012, it placed in the 51st-through-75th range in math. In rankings that rely heavily on a university’s number of highly cited researchers, such as the ARWU and the U.S. News and World Report Global University Rankings, KAU places highly.

In the U.S. News and World Report international rankings, 75 percent of the indicators considered have to do with bibliometric indicators — which include the number of publications and citations, how impactful those citations are and the proportion of papers that feature co-authors from different countries — all of which favor universities with highly cited professors. The other 25 percent is based on reputation. Other criteria used in U.S. News and World Report’s National University Rankings — such as student retention rates, selectivity and faculty resources — often are not available for international universities. So the outlet had to work with what it had, said Robert Morse, chief data strategist for the U.S. News and World Report. Morse said the goal of these global university rankings was to measure the “research mission of the university.”

Pachter said UC Berkeley’s math department itself benefited from a large number of highly cited researchers. The school, he said, has a robust applied-mathematics team — one of the most widely referenced specialties in the field. Some of the most respected professors, however, have few citations, Pachter said. He said that capturing what makes a university “good” goes beyond the numbers. “In math, it has a lot to do with the individuals who are in the departments,” Pachter said. “Many faculty at Berkeley have, at some point in their careers, proved famous theorems. Work that’s very deep — that’s the word we use in math — is respected and appreciated.”

(End of article)

[nomad soul]

KAU's response...

KAU rejects charges of foul play to boost ranking
By Ibrahim Naffee, Arab News | 10 December 2014
Source: http://www.arabnews.com/saudi-arabia/news/672271

JEDDAH--Academics and professors at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) have denied claims by a US media outlet that it has “bought” researchers to improve its rank in the global index of best-performing universities.

“In the last 10 years, KAU worked on developing its teaching to compete with advanced universities all over the world. However, there are many academic organizations that look down on Saudi universities due to the strong competition between the Arab and Western universities,” Dr. Hamza Shaaban, a professor at the university, said. "There is no university that pays money to obtain a high rank in the global classification. It is unacceptable,” Shaaban said.

A professor at KAU who spoke on the condition of anonymity denied the accusations. “The university has contracted part-time professors to develop its teaching staff. We work to attract international experts as many global universities do,” he said. The professor said there is ongoing cooperation with several foreign researchers and they are doing genuine work. He said a university cannot focus on its international ranking without paying attention to the advancement of scientific research on its grounds. “We should care about what the students do and what we offer them and how academic work is conducted inside the university. This is much more important than international rankings,” he added.

(End of article)

[Mushkilla]

Well, it seems wasta has played its role in the ranking of KAU!

[nomad soul]

How Saudi Universities Rose in the Global Rankings
By Charles McPhedran, Al Fanar Media | 15 October 2013
Source: http://www.al-fanarmedia.org/2013/10/how-saudi-universities-rose-in-the-global-rankings/

REUTERS//You can hear the smile in Saeed Alshamrani’s voice down a crackly phone line from Riyadh. The associate education professor’s program was one of the winners in this year’s rankings. King Saud University’s education faculty was the only one in the Arab world to achieve a top 100 rating in its discipline in the 2013 QS rankings. A key contributor to the department’s success, Alshamrani explains, are the “excellence clusters” that the university has set up, including his group, the Excellence Centre for Science and Mathematics Education. “We have a clear focus,” he says, with evident pride. “It’s about improving our research and that will improve our situation in science and mathematics education in Saudi Arabia.”

The major rankings – those done by Times Higher Education, QS and Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Center for World-Class Universities – give the impression that Saudi Arabia’s best universities, King Saud University and King Abdulaziz, comprise a minor Arab Ivy League. That notion raises objections in other parts of the Arab world. Many elsewhere take the attitude that those ranking results discredit the metrics themselves.

Others point to money’s influence on the rankings, and insinuate that – at worst – the Saudis have bought their way to the top or – at best – the country’s money has made competing with it impossible.

But the reality is that Saudi Arabia, often mocked abroad as a redoubt for the reactionary and over-religious, has produced many of the Arab world’s scientific and engineering avant-garde of late. “Saudi Arabia has been using its resources to help them engage and lead. And I think they are on the right track,” says Nasser Mansour, a senior lecturer in science education at Exeter University, who supervises Saudi students there as part of the institution’s research partnership with King Saud University.

The beginning of the academic year in the northern hemisphere is rankings season in higher education. This year, as usual, old school Anglo-Saxon institutions, venerable universities such as Oxford or Stanford, have dominated the top of the lists. But in the Arab world, institutions with hundreds of years of history, institutions famous across the Islamic world, such as Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, are almost universally absent. Instead, the top Arab institutions in the list are just decades old. The Saudi “A-team” – King Saud University and Abdulaziz– were set up in the 1950’s and 60’s. In subsequent decades, a number of other universities sprang up in Saudi. Still, the universities were largely dominated by religious studies.

In the 1980’s and 90’s, the education ministry emphasized Islamic ideology and the Arabic language. That emphasis shifted as the Saudi royal family decided to embark on a shake-up of higher education to promote vocational training and internationally competitive scientific research. As a consequence, the country’s higher-education ministry set up a number of “blue ribbon advisory panels,” comprised of international consultants, says the University of Pittsburgh’s John Weidman, a professor of higher and international development education, employed as a consultant in Saudi in 2006. The panels were given relative autonomy from the government to recommend changes.

King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, an all-male institution, was the first university to try out the reforms, the outline of which could be found in a 25-year plan drawn up by the ministry in 2006. "They [the government] coupled efforts to improve the quality of science instruction with some efforts to slowly change the status of women in higher education,” Weidman said. “They really wanted to show the world that the Saudis could do some unique things. Because they’d really been accustomed to importing technology for things as basic as the desalinization of salt water.”

The 25-year strategic plan was to be realized in several five-year increments, 2006 briefing papers show. One stage of the plan, dating to 2010, points toward a research focus for many Saudi universities. That phase of the plan fosters competition among Saudi universities and pushes globally competitive and utilitarian research. And the 2010 white paper’s vision aligns with criteria that the rankings privilege.

In 2013, the results are in. Today, the top echelon of Saudi universities is the best in the Arab world, according to the rankings anyways. The universities regularly place in the top 400 worldwide; their exact rank fluctuates year-on-year. In this year’s rankings, the “Saudi sandstones” were the only Arab universities to feature in all three major surveys, with all making it into the top 400 in Times, QS and Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings.

And they weren’t the only Saudi universities to be included in the rankings. King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals featured in two of the three listings. Another university, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), entered the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings in the 400-500 band. Moneyed, English-speaking KAUST was founded in 2009 with a $10-billion endowment.

Yet almost everyone in the rankings business sees the potential for the university to advance very rapidly, although its postgraduate-only status precludes inclusion in the Times and QS rankings. “KAUST is interesting, even though it doesn’t show up in our rankings,” says Ben Sowter, the head of QS’s intelligence unit. “They have got one of the fastest growing research and citation records in the world right now.”

KAUST – which did not respond to Al-Fanar Media’s request for an interview – specializes in applied sciences and in fields geared towards national development, such as desert agriculture, and buzz technologies such as nanotech. The elite institution’s focus reflects the broader Saudi sector’s strengths, an analysis of this year’s rankings results shows.

The Shanghai Jiao Tong ranking rates three Saudi universities (King Saud, King Abdulaziz and King Fahd) in the top 150 engineering schools worldwide, for example. And QS has placed King Fahd well across several engineering disciplines, from aeronautical to electrical engineering. Another Saudi strength is mathematics. King Fahd is rated in both the QS and Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings for its program. King Fahd, King Saud and Abdulaziz all make it into the top 75 of the Shanghai top 200-math list.

In practice, say researchers, the Saudi sandstones’ success can be explained by elite university research centers that are relatively outward looking. Within their fields, many centers have research autonomy. And partnerships with international institutions mean that foreign scholars are involved in both center research and reviewing grants. “We have research groups that submit their proposals. And we study the proposals with a very critical eye,” says Saed Alshamrani at King Saud University’s Excellence Centre for Mathematics and Science Education. The Saudi Arabian state boasts the highest university spend as a percentage of GDP in the world, according to a ranking of national higher-education systems released earlier this year by Universitas 21, a global network of research-intensive universities. “The vision of the centers is to be leading; that is the vision of higher education in Saudi Arabia: To lead in terms of research,” says the University of Exeter’s Mansour. “They have a lot of money. But it’s not all about money. They are very keen.”

Outcomes at one top center, at King Saud, are measured both in terms of how they contribute to national development and in relation to competitive benchmarks, scholars say. Above and beyond this, however, the center is judged on the number of publications they place in competitive, English-language journals. King Saud’s science and mathematics education center seeks to place publications in top-ranked, highly regarded journals– specifically those that are rated at threes or twos in the Thomson journal rankings.

Some observers say the no-strings-attached funding granted to the centers and their elite researchers carries dangers. “I make this point… about building a culture of productivity. . .to my Saudi colleagues all the time,” says another U.S. professor, who works as an education consultant in Saudi Arabia. Supporting the centers instead of individual researchers or research teams via competitive grants results in some people being paid a lot to do a little, he says. “They have to be enterprising. It’s not my view that the Saudis are very enterprising.”

That indolence is holding Saudi research, and by inference the university rankings back, he implies. And the consultant is not the only one to criticize the Saudi model. Some critics argue that the Saudi government’s decision to focus so much of university resources on research is the wrong decision, given the well-known demographic challenges that the country faces—a large swell of young people. The critics counsel more teaching-focused institutions.

Others, quoted in a 2011 Science magazine report, accuse King Saud and King Abdulaziz of inflating research and rankings performance by paying highly cited foreign faculty to create “on-paper only” affiliations with Saudi research institutions. King Abdulaziz calls the arrangements legitimate attempts to boost its research talent, while King Saud scholars say their university’s recruitment practices are standard for the industry.

Elsewhere in the Arab world, critics argue that, high-quality science and engineering research notwithstanding, the Saudi institutions are not comprehensive research universities just because they have a few bright spots in some disciplines. After all, this argument goes, none of the Saudi schools made the top 100 in the big three rankings this year. If they want to climb further up the rankings ladder, the Saudi universities will need more radical reforms that will increase freedoms across all fields.

Today, most of the world’s most elite institutions – the top 50 – are located in democratic nations.

“If you’re focused and specialist, we will be able to capture that excellence,” says Phil Baty, the rankings editor at Times Higher Education. “But I do believe on a personal level that…you won’t see yourself challenging Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge without a very open and free approach to higher education.”

(End of article)