Abstract
Global University Rankings (GURs) intend to measure the performance of universities worldwide. Other rankings have recently appeared that evaluate the creation of environmental policies in universities, e.g., the Universitas Indonesia (UI) GreenMetric. This work aims to analyze the interaction between the Top 500 of such rankings by considering the geographical location of universities and their typologies. A descriptive analysis and a statistical logistical regression analysis were carried out. The former demonstrated that European and North American universities predominated the Top 500 of GURs, while Asian universities did so in the Top 500 of the UI GreenMetric ranking, followed by European universities. Older universities predominated the Top 500 of GURs, while younger ones did so in the Top 500 of the UI GreenMetric ranking. The second analysis demonstrated that although Latin American universities were barely present in the Top 500 of GURs, the probability of them appearing in the Top 500 of the UI GreenMetric ranking was 5-fold. We conclude that a low association exists between universities’ academic performance and their commitment to the natural environment in the heart of their institutions. It would be advisable for GURs to include environmental indicators to promote sustainability at universities and to contribute to climate change.
Highlights
Given the demand for information about universities and the object to compare them, university ranking systems were developed in many countries of the world (e.g., Australia, Canada, the UK, the US) [1], but they were soon followed by Global University Rankings (GURs), and are a key factor in knowing a university’s performance, productivity and quality according to its position in these rankings
The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) ranking uses six objective indicators to classify universities all over the world with different weights (%) each: number of former students (10%) and staff members (20%) winning Nobel Prizes (NP) or Fields Medals (FM); number of highly cited researchers, as selected by Clarivate Analytics (20%); number of articles published in Nature and Science Journals (20%); number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) (20%); a university’s performance per capita (10%)
In the top 200 of Life Sciences, we find that universities are more frequently located in the UE, those reaching the top 200 in Social Sciences are based in the USA, while those among the top 200 in Physics or Biology are located elsewhere in the world [9]
Summary
Given the demand for information about universities and the object to compare them, university ranking systems were developed in many countries of the world (e.g., Australia, Canada, the UK, the US) [1], but they were soon followed by Global University Rankings (GURs), and are a key factor in knowing a university’s performance, productivity and quality according to its position in these rankings. The ARWU ranking uses six objective indicators to classify universities all over the world with different weights (%) each: number of former students (10%) and staff members (20%) winning Nobel Prizes (NP) or Fields Medals (FM); number of highly cited researchers, as selected by Clarivate Analytics (20%); number of articles published in Nature and Science Journals (20%); number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) (20%); a university’s performance per capita (10%) This ranking has been published since 2003 and is the oldest of the four studied GURs. The data sources are Thompson Reuters’ Web of Science Database and Resources of National agencies
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