If, like me, you read the THE World Rankings from the bottom up to avoid disappointment, you may have caught yourself wondering how different the listing would look if someone other than Thomson Reuters supplied the data. To the surprise of many of us, TR weren’t chosen to supply citation data to the REF. So, is it only a matter of time before Elsevier are selected to supply data to the THE World Rankings as well? I don’t know. But imagine how my interest piqued when I discovered that our wealthy Dutch friends do generate a World Institution Ranking using data from SCOPUS. It is called the Scimago Institutions Rankings (SIR), is freely available on the web, and provides a very scientific looking window on Institutional rankings, full of red and green arrows, serious-looking abbreviations, and red and amber dots.
Image courtesy of http://www.freeimages.co.uk
Whilst they try to make out they are “NOT A LEAGUE TABLE” (their caps), I’m really not sure to what other use you could put such data. Indeed, Wikipedia defines a League Table as a “a chart or list which compares sports teams or… institutions…ranking them in order of ability or achievement”. So it must be true. In fact Wikipedia go on to stress that whislt “a league table may list several related statistics… they are generally sorted by the primary one that determines the rankings.” Thus it is unfortunate that the SIR ranks institutions according to their total publication output (the bigger you are, the higher you climb), even though they do offer a variety of other (weird and wonderful) measures.
The real beauty of the SIR is, of course, that it is only available online so you can run a milisecond-long search for your Institution rather than a 5-10 second heart-stopping scan in the printed version. I know, I probably take this too seriously.
Take a look yourself and let us know what you think.
Open-ise. 