World-wide university rankings: A Scandinavian approach

Although universities’ world rankings are popular, their design and methods still request considerable elaborations. The paper demonstrates some shortcomings in the Academic World Ranking of Universities (ARWU, Shanghai Jiao Tong University) ranking methods. One deficiency is that universities’ scale differences are neglected due to omitting the whole input side. By resampling and reanalyzing the ARWU data, the paper proposes an input-output analysis for measuring universities’ scientific productivity with special emphasis on those universities which meet the productivity threshold (i.e. share of output exceeds share of input) in a certain group of universities. The productivity analysis on Scandinavian universities evaluates multidisciplinary and specialized universities on their own terms; consequently the ranking based on scientific productivity deviates significantly from the ARWU.