Analysing the performance of New Zealand universities in the 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities

2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities

This occasional paper analyses the performance of the New Zealand universities in the 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), published by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Each year, the release of these rankings generates worldwide interest. However, the focus on the overall rankings can mask important underlying trends in the performance of New Zealand universities, so a more comprehensive analysis of their performance is important.¹

Like all systems that attempt to arrive at an overall ranking for institutions, the ARWU has a number of limitations.² On the other hand, the ARWU has the advantage of being built on a relatively stable suite of component measures over time. The university rankings are determined using a weighted score of six individual measures: the number of highly cited researchers, the number of alumni of the university who have received awards, the number of faculty of the university who have received awards, the number of indexed publications in Nature and Science and the number of publications in Thomson Reuters’ Science and Social Science indices.³ The sixth measure generates a weighted per academic staff member score for the preceding five measures.

There are two key points to note about the measures used in the ARWU. First, they all relate to research performance. Second, five of the six measures are based on totals of publications or people, with no adjustment for the size of the institution concerned. This biases the results in favour of larger institutions, who may, or may not be the most productive institutions.

The analysis that follows contains the results for five of New Zealand’s universities. The Auckland University of Technology, Lincoln University and The University of Waikato sit outside the ARWU top 500, so no data is available to analyse their performance.

The analysis in this paper also includes the average performance of the Australian Group of Eight (G8) universities.⁴ These are the largest research-intensive Australian universities and provide a useful benchmark for the New Zealand universities.

Footnotes