Does a Country/Region's Economic Status Affect Its Universities' Presence in International Rankings?

Purpose: Study how economic parameters affect positions in the Academic Ranking of World Universities' top 500 published by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Graduate School of Education in countries/regions with listed higher education institutions. Design/methodology/approach: The methodology used capitalises on the multi-variate characteristics of the data analysed. The multi-colinearity problem posed is solved by running principal components prior to regression analysis, using both classical(OLS) and robust(Huber and Tukey) methods. Findings: Our results revealed that countries/regions with long ranking traditions are highly competitive. Findings also showed that some countries/regions such as Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy, had a larger number of universities in the top positions than predicted by the regression model. In contrast, for Japan, a country where social and economic performance is high, the number of ARWU universities projected by the model was much larger than the actual figure. In much the same vein, countries/regions that invest heavily in education, such as Japan and Denmark, had lower than expected results.Research limitations: Using data from only one ranking is a limitation of this study, but the methodology used could be useful to other global rankings. Practical implications: The results provide good insights for policy makers. They indicate the existence of a relationship between research output and the number of universities per million inhabitants. Countries/regions, which have historically prioritised higher education, exhibited highest values for indicators that compose the rankings methodology; furthermore,minimum increase in welfare indicators could exhibited significant rises in the presence of their universities on the rankings.Originality/value: This study is well defined and the result answers important questions about characteristics of countries/regions and their higher education system.

中国与西班牙可再生能源领域合作研究的计量分析

随着人类对环境问题越来越关注,世界各国有关可再生能源利用的研究也不断升温。该文应用文献计量方法,对Web of Science数据库中2003—2012年中国与西班牙可再生能源领域的论文及其参考文献进行了分析。基于两国合作的论文及其参考文献,识别出两国合作的热点研究领域,分析了参与这些领域研究的机构。尽管中国和西班牙在该领域的合著论文很少,但仍可以观察到合著论文的数量随时间的变化不断增加。最后,根据可再生能源领域的论文耦合识别出该领域的网络群体(bibliographic communities),对其进行多维度社会网络分析,得出主要的学科领域以及机构和大学列表。