There are some interesting points I have found from an article about University Ranking:
The SJTU and THES ranking lists led to three types of reaction:
1. severe doubt and scepticism as to the usefulness of this kind of exercise was the most generalized one—except within the well-classified institutions;
2. the second reaction was to recognize its utility, but to suggest other, more refined tools to assess academic quality;
3. and the third reaction was to take local measures to try to perform better for the following assessment.
Despite recent improvements, certain criticisms persist with regard to the 2006 classifications:
(i) the weight given to hard sciences when compared with humanities, the arts and social sciences;
(ii) the bias against non-English articles and/or publications in non-article forms (book chapters, national reports, conference proceedings);
(iii) the heterogeneity of the data used (type of staff, with different teaching or research activities, level of staff, including only professors or all researchers, inclusion/exclusion of native-born students who are non-national due to foreign parentage)
(iv) the bibliometric shortcomings due to citation bias and/or different or missing institutional names (hospital or university-based, departments or research units without institutional mention, language used)
(v) the case of institutions that are incomplete (in particular without Sciences and/or Medicine areas), or are merging, splitting.
But, as recently quoted by the President of a Japanese university: ‘a farmer wanting to breed a big cow should focus more on nutrition than the weighing scales’.
Reference:
http://ndt.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/extract/gfm279v1
Personal opinions for Mahidol University:
1. Make papers of high quality and publish in journals with high impact factor. Do not make small pieces of research in order to get several publications.
2. Give more research grants to young staffs/scientists. As a former President of Society for Neuroscience, USA, said "Most of breakthrough papers are created by young scientists". This statement can be true in Mahidol University.
3. Maintain international standards for ranking. Do not try to make them weak just for our satisfaction.
Permphan
