ShanghaiRanking - ARWU (Academic Rankings of World Universities)
In the latest ShanghaiRanking's ARWU published in August 2024, Masaryk University ranked 401st to 500th. It has thus confirmed its position from the previous two years. More than 2,500 institutions were evaluated, and the ranking publishes the top 1,000. Six of the Czech Republic's public universities placed in the rankings. MU holds the 2nd position behind CU, beithg those two the only Czech universities in the TOP500. They are followed by UP, BUT, CZU and UCT in the order of the scores obtained.
This year's ranking of Masaryk University is based on performance in four indicators. In three of them there was a year-on-year improvement in the scores obtained. These include the number of articles published in Nature and Science (N&S), the number of articles indexed in Web of Science (PUB), the representative on the Clarivate list of Highly Cited Researchers (HiCi) and the Per capita academic performance of an institution (PCP). In this particular ranking, MU does not score in two indicators, namely Nobel Prize or Fields Medal winners among alumni (Alumni) and Nobel Prize or Fields Medal winners among staff (Award). The only institution in the Czech Republic that scores in these indicators is UCT (score 5.2 in the Alumni indicator).
Harvard University (USA) traditionally leads the overall ranking and has been in first place for the twenty-two years in a row. The silver and bronze positions this year were taken by Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), both again from the USA, while the fourth place goes to the University of Cambridge from the UK.
Methodology:
ShanghaiRankings' Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) is one of the three most widely monitored university rankings in the world. It was launched in 2003 by Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, then in 2009 the ShanghaiRanking Consultancy was established as a separate company and the ranking remains organisationally independent. It focuses on the performance of universities purely in research and development. Masaryk University has been listed in the ranking since 2017.
ARWU uses six indicators to rank universities around the world. The Alumni indicator assesses the quality of education by the number of alumni who have received the Nobel Prize or the Fields Medal. The ranking recognises awards going back to 1930, however, older awards have progressively less weight in the ranking. Similarly, ARWU also follows this approach in the Award indicator, which tracks the number of employees who have received the aforementioned awards during their time at the institution (for Alumni, however, these are in selected scientific fields, i.e. chemistry, physics, medicine, economics and mathematics). Awards going back to 1940 are being recognized for the Award indicator. The quality of academic staff is also assessed by the HiCi indicator based on the number of highly cited scientists with a primary affiliation to the institution (a list of Highly Cited Scientists is published on a yearly basis by Clarivate).
Scientific performance is assessed in ARWU through the lens of two indicators - N&S and PUB. The first one refers to the number of articles published in Nature and Science during a five-year reference period. The PUB indicator measures the number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index-Expanded and Social Science Citation Index within the refference year. The performance in all the previous five indicators, weighted by the total number (FTE) of academic staff, forms the basis for the last indicator, referred to as PCP.
Performance in each indicator is converted to a 0-100 scale, with a score of 100 going to the highest performing institution. This produces a score for each indicator that is converted according to the value of its weight in the ranking to calculate the overall score. Overall score gets also scaled so that the best scoring institution appears with score of 100. Scaled overall score than determines the ranking.
ARWU ranking indikators:
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10% Alumni
Number of the alumni of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals. Alumni are defined as those who obtain bachelor's, master's or doctoral degrees from the institution.
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20% Award
Number of the staff of an institution winning Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Economics and Fields Medal in Mathematics. Staff is defined as those who work at an institution at the time of winning the prize.
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20% HiCi
Number of Highly Cited Researchers selected by Clarivate. Only the primary affiliations of Highly Cited Researchers are considered.
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20% N&S
Number of research articles published in Nature and Science within five year range.
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20% PUB
Number of papers indexed in Science Citation Index-Expanded and Social Science Citation Index in the reference year. When calculating the total number of papers of an institution, a special weight of two was introduced for papers indexed in SSCI.
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10% PCP
Weighted scores of the above five indicators divided by the number of full-time equivalent academic staff.