Einstein`s Effect on University Rankings

Einstein’s Effect on University Rankings
Lettre envoyée à la revue Science le 14 septembre 2007
Par Yves Gingras
Directeur scientifique de l’Observatoire des sciences et des technologies
Professeur au département d’histoire de l’Université du Québec à Montréal
Titulaire de la Chaire de recherche du Canada en histoire et sociologie des sciences
Membre du Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie
The story on university rankings (Science, 24 August, p. 1026), was interesting in many
ways, but the most important lesson to draw from the sordid debate between the Free
University of Berlin and Humboldt University to appropriate the name of Einstein for
themselves was missing: the very fact that the presence in the “indicator of quality” of a
1921 Nobel Prize could change the ranking of a university (85 years later!) by more than
100 places, is in itself the comic (or tragic) proof that this “indicator” in the “Shanghai
Ranking” is bogus. The basic methodology of evaluation demands that the chosen
indicator be 1) adequate to the object, which is not the case here since Einstein’s Nobel
tells us nothing about the quality of these universities today; 2) homogeneous in its
measure and 3) that its value does not change erratically because of a minute variation of
one component of the indicator for organizations known to be very inertial and that
cannot change rapidly in one or two years. It remains an open question for social
psychologists to explain why university administrators care so much about the Shanghai
Ranking, known to be difficult to reproduce (1), instead of using the more simple and
homogenous (and often converging) indicators of citations, publications and research
investments which provide sufficient information to get a fair idea of the place of an
institution in the field of research. Adding apples and oranges to get a “synthetic fruit”
cannot do justice to any of the ranked organizations, which are better measured along
many separate dimensions.
(1) R.V. Florian, Scientometrics, 72, 25, 2007.
END