Shedding the Light on the Stability of University Rankings in the ICT Field

ABSTRACT

A global trend nowadays is shifting the attention from the overall university ranking towards the ranking in a particular scientific field: “Ranking by Subject” and/or “Field Ranking”. The objective of the research presented in this paper is the review of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) aspect of the universities performance. The major concern of the study is the uncertainty and sensitivity of ICT field ranking, regarding the weighting scheme of a particular ranking methodology. The paper thus examines the ICT field-based section of the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and URAP rankings and gives a detailed comparison of the stability of these ranking methods. According to the results, URAP ICT ranking is shown to be more stable than QS ICT ranking, with a lower level of uncertainty and sensitivity to different model assumptions. Moreover, we gave an overview of particular standings of Indian universities in both QS and URAP ICT rankings, tackling the issue of the uncertainty and sensitivity of their positions.

KEYWORDS:

• Information and communication technologies (ICT)
• QS
• Ranking by subject
• Scientometrics
• University rankings
• Uncertainty and sensitivity
• URAP

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marina Dobrota

Marina Dobrota is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade. She received the PhD degree in the field of computational statistics. Her major professional interests are applied statistics, composite indicators, ICT development strategy, data mining in medicine, and biostatistics. She published more than 30 articles in scientific journals and conferences. She reviewed several papers in scientific journals in SSCI and SCI-e lists.

E-mail: [email protected]

Veljko Jeremic

Veljko Jeremic is an assistant professor at the Department of Operational Research and Statistics at the Faculty of Organizational Science, University of Belgrade. He received the PhD degree in the field of computational statistics. He has published over 60 scientific papers with emphasis on ISI indexed journals. He is the co-author of one university textbook. He has acted as a reviewer for many ISI indexed journals, such as JASIST, Scientometrics, and Journal of Applied Statistics.

E-mail: [email protected]