On Ranking Improvement

Nowadays, many departments and universities are working hard to move up in the Shanghai Jiao Tong University University Ranking, the Times Higher Education Supplement World University Ranking, the US News & World Report Ranking to name but a few. Indeed, a department/university has to continually improve itself just to maintain its current position. Is it worthwhile to set oneself the goal of becoming a top 100 university in the world, say?

Readers of this blog, if there are any, might find the opinion of Moshe Vardi, a careful observer of academic life and one of the outstanding computer scientists of our time, on this issue illuminating. In his interview  Moshe Vardi Speaks Out (on the Proof, the Whole Proof, and Nothing But the Proof) by Marianne Winslett (SIGMOD RECORD, Volume 35, Number 1, March 2006), Moshe said: 

The goal of improving a department’s ranking is not a realistic goal. You can say that you want to have more graduate students; that is something you can measure: how many graduate students do you admit per year? You can look at the average GRE score of the students, and say that you would like to have better graduate students. You can say that you would like to see your department getting more funding. There are all kinds of things you can measure and you can control, but you cannot control the ranking that US News will generate with their complex formulas. Since everybody is trying to improve, it would be nice if you could squeeze more departments into the top ten. But since only ten departments can be in the top ten, I think it is not a useful goal for departments to have. I would advise departments to focus on measurable goals and attainable goals. I never felt that the goal of ranking improvement was useful or attainable.

(The emphasis is mine.) I think that all of the Icelandic universities would benefit by following, or at least considering carefully, Moshe's advice. For instance, to the best of my knowledge, there are now three PhD students in computer science in Icelandic universities. What about setting ourselves the goal of improving that number fourfold, say? On a different note, a quick and dirty  count indicates that the members of staff affiliated with computer science departments in Iceland have all together about 330 entries in the DBLP (one of the most comprehensive bibliographic databases for computer science researchers available at http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/index.html). I might set computer science at Reykjavík University the goal to achieve 300 entries in the DBLP within five years. If we can do so, other forms of recognition will surely  follow. 

  

 

Athugasemdir

[luca (IP-tala skráð) 29.1.2007 kl. 09:51]

Addendum: By the way, to put things into perspective, Moshe Vardi  alone has  314  DBLP entries. He is a truly outstanding scientists, and his level of visibility is no surprise to active computer science researchers. These numbers just show how long we have to go to become truly competitive on the world arena.