Ranking Universities    

             By Flor Lacanilao

The Philippines remains behind in the regional race for development. We always lag in international rankings of nations and universities. A major reason is our failure to use established international indicators of performance.

An evaluation of world universities, for example, based on academic and research performance is being done by a leading Chinese university. It uses the established indicators of performance. Now in its fourth year, no university from the Philippines has yet made the top 100 in the Asia Pacific, or in the world’s top 500.

In the Asia Pacific, the top universities are Tokyo U, Kyoto , Australian Nat’l, Hebrew U, Osaka , Tohoku, Melbourne , Tokyo Tech, and Nagoya . Ten tied for no. 10, including the Nat’l U Singapore, Tel Aviv, and Queensland .

Worldwide, the top ten are Harvard, Cambridge , Stanford, Berkeley , MIT, Caltech, Columbia , Princeton, Chicago , and Oxford .

The study uses the following indicators: alumni and staff winning prizes and awards (30%), articles covered in major citation indexes (20%), highly cited researchers (20%), articles published in the journals Nature and Science (20%), and the per capita academic performance of an institution (10%).

Sources of published articles and citations are the following indexes of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI): Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. (For full report, refer to Scientometrics 68:135-150, 2008 or
http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/ranking.htm)

Other university rankings, however, use information obtained through
questionnaires. For example, in the ranking of Asian universities by the defunct Asia Magazine (I997-2000), 35 Asian universities, including Tokyo U, withdrew participation because of such subjective measures. Four from the Philippines (UP, La Salle, Ateneo, UST) made the list of the remaining 77 universities in Asia (http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/features/universities2000/schools/multi.overall.html ).

The most commonly used measure of research and S&T activities is the number of published papers indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI) and, recently, the SCI Expanded, as in the above ranking of universities. Earlier articles on evaluation using SCI have appeared in top science journals and magazines. Scientific American (August 1995), for example, used SCI and ranked the Philippines ’ S&T performance as no. 60 worldwide.

Yet the DOST placed a 33-page advertisement in the Scientific American (February 1996) under the banner "Globally Competitive Philippines." It claims “pioneering efforts in metals technology, materials science, electronics and information technology, and, most especially, biotechnology.”

Who are we kidding? It is time our country and universities use established international measures to improve performance instead of resorting to publicity and claims of achievements


Flor Lacanilao
Retired professor of marine science
UP Diliman
Tel: 928-6514
Email: flor_lacanilao@yahoo.com