 The 2020 edition of the Academic Ranking of World Universities, the ARWU or Shanghai rankings, have just been published and you won't find a lot of surprises looking at the top 10. They are the usual suspects, all the big U.S. universities, plus Cambridge and Oxford representing the U.K. And in general the U.S. and U.K. do dominate the rankings. So if we go through it, you will see lots of American universities. If we were to do a search, we can get a list of the U.S. universities and you'll see in the top 100, there are... Oh, there's my old employer, University of Pittsburgh. There are 41 American universities out of the top 100 in the rankings. Not surprisingly, the United Kingdom comes in second with, well, if we go down the list here, 8 U.K. universities in the top 100. The surprising thing though is that Australia does especially well on these rankings. And there you have 7 Australian universities in the top 100. That is the group of 8 Australian universities minus Adelaide. University of Adelaide has actually fallen in this year's rankings down from the 100 to 150 range into the 151 to 200 range. The other group of 8 Australian universities are all in the global top 100 and that's a bit surprising for a relatively small country of 25 million people to be nearly matching the United Kingdom and way ahead of educational powerhouses like Germany, Japan, China, France, the rest of the world, Canada doesn't come close to Australia. Canada, despite being larger than Australia, still having the English language bias in its favour only has 4 universities in the global top 100. The Shanghai rankings are produced by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy, which is a commercial spinoff of the Shanghai Jotong University's centre for global university rankings. The Shanghai Ranking Consultancy adopted the Shanghai Jotong University methodology when it was spun off into this commercial entity. And this method for ranking universities is essentially the Chinese vision of what a university should be. In fact, the R rankings were originally designed because China around the year 2000 wanted to see its C9 universities, the top 9 Chinese universities, rise into the global top 100 and they had the problem, what are the global top 100? There was no list and so they made their own list and what did they prioritize? Well, quality of teaching, only if you're alumni win Nobel prizes and Fields medals. Fields medals are effectively the Nobel prize for mathematics. Look in the fine print and that's Nobel prizes except for peace or literature. The science prizes are fine, economics is okay, no peace, no literature. The quality of the faculty at a university, again getting science Nobel prizes and Fields medals or highly cited researchers, we'll get back to that in a minute, research output, nature in science, only those two top scientific journals and papers indexed in the social science citation index which are usually the more cited academic journals although there are some anomalies in that and there's a per capita adjustments to make sure that small institutions don't get swamped out of the rankings. Now I'd like to focus on one in particular, the highly cited researcher list because obviously there's not much you can do to get Nobel prizes. I mean either you've got Nobel prize winners or you don't and you're not going to be able to buy them very easily on the open market. Publications in nature, science and highly cited indices, those require a lot of management effort. You really have to work hard to get those papers and in my experience working at universities, university managers are not very, let's say, interested in improving their management to get people publishing in higher prestige outlets. What you can do however is buy in highly cited researchers and if we were to take a look at the highly cited researcher list, that's produced by Clarivate which used to be Thompson Reuters, it's now an independent company and Clarivate will tell you there are some 6216 highly cited researchers in the world by their method and where they located, well, Australia for a very small country has 4.4% of them which is an enormous concentration. It's so enormous that Clarivate even notes that Australia continues to impress the number of researchers that recognize its highly cited is more than tripled in six years, which is pretty amazing though part of that's changed in methodology. Australian research institutions appear to have recruited a significant number of highly cited researchers since 2014 and we can see that in the Australian stats if we go to my own new paper on the rankings and if we look at the highly cited researcher list here, this takes the years for which I was able to get data 2004, 2007 and the more recent years there are several methodology changes but throughout the methodology changes you can look at Australia's percentage of highly cited researchers, it used to be a little more modest down below 2% or so and since 2014 with the massive recruitment of Chinese students into Australia it has boomed until now we're at the point where 4.36% more than double the percentage of highly cited researchers are Australia based as used to be. The paper, if you'd like to see it, you can find it on my website it is called How Rankings Obsession Drove the Group of 8 Chinese Student Binge and it is about how Australia's group of 8 universities have risen up the ARWO rankings primarily by recruiting Chinese students and feeding those that Chinese student tuition money into buying up highly cited researchers and if you want to see that Chinese student binge you can see there are 5 Australian universities that have really binged on international and Chinese students that's Monash, University of Melbourne University of Sydney, University of Queensland University of New South Wales and University of Queensland and not surprisingly these are the 5 Australian universities that have really zoomed up the rankings the Australian National University which used to be the top ranked Australian University on the ARWO when it first started back in 2003 has drop, drop, dropped because it has not had the money to compete with Melbourne and Queensland which have recruited enormous numbers of Chinese students and poured the money back into buying up highly cited researchers now something you may notice about the ARWO ranking books not counted, humanities not counted social sciences modestly counted the highly cited researchers list does include social scientists but of the 160 something highly cited researchers at group of 8 universities only 4 are social scientists and those 4 include 1 physicist who got credited for economics and 3 epidemiologists who got credited in public health which by some accounts is a social science so the ARWO take it or leave it is effectively China's rankings China set the goal for its universities to succeed on these metrics and China has succeeded, China now is nipping at Australia's heels with 6 universities in the global top 100 on their own rankings and of those 6 universities I believe 5 are in the C9 universities I don't believe University of Science Technology of China is these 6 universities have climbed the rankings now China this year said it wanted its universities to stop pursuing success in the English speaking world and instead focus on indigenous research what that means is the ARWO is likely to become less important for Chinese universities as China ships its ambitions and says it doesn't want its researchers seeking to publish in science and nature they want their researchers to publish in Chinese journals so this is all in flux the irony is western universities and in particular Australian universities are pulling out all the stops to succeed in these rankings even though China itself is abandoning them now we'll see how well those Australian universities do post-coronavirus they have only got into this fantastic position in the rankings by pouring Chinese student money back into hiring highly excited researchers it's the only lever that's really pullable and the group of 8 universities have all seen huge increases in their scores on highly excited researchers you can actually get the sub scores here by pulling down and you'll see that the Australian universities actually score very high there if we were to look at all, if you look at Melbourne for example University of Melbourne is down here in the 30s and you'll see that compared to other universities in its range it has a fantastic score on highly excited researchers because that's how it has pulled itself up into this area in the ranking those Australian universities are likely to fall down the rankings not in 2021 because the 2021 rankings will be based on the current highly excited research accounts of these universities but probably in 2022 when Australia has to start letting people go due to budget cuts, we'll see what happens to their rankings on the ARWU that's about it for the ARWU rankings, 2020 is now out have a look and I hope this enlightens you a little bit about what's going on to find my own report on this, just go to SalvatoreBabonus.com Google Salvatore Babonus, it should pop right up and you will see leading the page, my report How Rankings Obsession Prove the Group of 8 Chinese Student Binge