IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/scippl/v45y2018i4p503-514..html

Universities as celebrities? How the media select information from a large research assessment exercise

Author

Listed:
  • Brigida Blasi
  • Sandra Romagnosi
  • Andrea Bonaccorsi

Abstract

The article enters the international debate on university rankings, observing the visibility premium that institutions gain from their publication. Despite the deep academic skepticism towards the composite indicators used at this aim, rankings are an adaptive solution for individuals to treat information uncertain in nature. Rankings summarize many university quality dimensions into one single number and they fit well the need of media to package information. We have used data from the press review of the Italian VQR 2004–10 to analyze the factors that lead universities to be more frequently cited, under the hypothesis that the visibility of a university is a function of its intrinsic characteristics, such as number of students, prestige, age, or size or density of population in its location. Through a set of regression models, we find that the only variable that matters is the presence in the top positions.

Suggested Citation

  • Brigida Blasi & Sandra Romagnosi & Andrea Bonaccorsi, 2018. "Universities as celebrities? How the media select information from a large research assessment exercise," Science and Public Policy, Oxford University Press, vol. 45(4), pages 503-514.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:scippl:v:45:y:2018:i:4:p:503-514.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/scipol/scx078
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Grewal, Rajdeep & Dearden, James A. & Lilien, Gary L., 2008. "The University Rankings Game: Modeling the Competition Among Universities for Ranking," The American Statistician, American Statistical Association, vol. 62, pages 232-237, August.
    2. repec:wbk:wbpubs:2600 is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Griffith, Amanda & Rask, Kevin, 2007. "The influence of the US News and World Report collegiate rankings on the matriculation decision of high-ability students: 1995-2004," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 26(2), pages 244-255, April.
    4. Lutz Bornmann & Rüdiger Mutz & Hans-Dieter Daniel, 2013. "Multilevel-statistical reformulation of citation-based university rankings: The Leiden ranking 2011/2012," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(8), pages 1649-1658, August.
    5. Albarrán, Pedro & Crespo, Juan A. & Ortuño, Ignacio & Ruiz-Castillo, Javier, 2009. "A comparison of the scientific performance of the U. S. and the European Union at the turn of the XXI century," UC3M Working papers. Economics we095534, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía.
    6. Christopher N. Avery & Mark E. Glickman & Caroline M. Hoxby & Andrew Metrick, 2013. "A Revealed Preference Ranking of U.S. Colleges and Universities," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 128(1), pages 425-467.
    7. Moore, William J & Newman, Robert J & Turnbull, Geoffrey K, 2001. "Reputational Capital and Academic Pay," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 39(4), pages 663-671, October.
    8. James Monks & Ronald G. Ehrenberg, 1999. "The Impact of US News and World Report College Rankings on Admission Outcomes and Pricing Decisions at Selective Private Institutions," NBER Working Papers 7227, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. D. Randall Smith, 2019. "The Lure of Academic and Social Reputations Versus Athletic Success: Influences on Enrollment Yield at NCAA Division I Institutions," Research in Higher Education, Springer;Association for Institutional Research, vol. 60(6), pages 870-904, September.
    2. Jeongeun Kim, 2018. "The Functions and Dysfunctions of College Rankings: An Analysis of Institutional Expenditure," Research in Higher Education, Springer;Association for Institutional Research, vol. 59(1), pages 54-87, February.
    3. Ellen Hazelkorn, 2011. "Measuring World-class Excellence and the Global Obsession with Rankings," Chapters, in: Roger King & Simon Marginson & Rajani Naidoo (ed.), Handbook on Globalization and Higher Education, chapter 29, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    4. Roger King & Simon Marginson & Rajani Naidoo (ed.), 2011. "Handbook on Globalization and Higher Education," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 13590.
    5. David L. Sjoquist & John V. Winters, 2016. "The Effects of State Merit Aid Programs on Attendance at Elite Colleges," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 83(2), pages 527-549, October.
    6. Christopher Claassen, 2015. "Measuring university quality," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 104(3), pages 793-807, September.
    7. Arnaud Chevalier & Xiaoxuan Jia, 2016. "Subject-Specific League Tables and Students' Application Decisions," Manchester School, University of Manchester, vol. 84(5), pages 600-620, September.
    8. Takao Kato & Chad Sparber, 2013. "Quotas and Quality: The Effect of H-1B Visa Restrictions on the Pool of Prospective Undergraduate Students from Abroad," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 95(1), pages 109-126, March.
    9. Horstschräer, Julia, 2012. "University rankings in action? The importance of rankings and an excellence competition for university choice of high-ability students," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 31(6), pages 1162-1176.
    10. Abigail Cormier & Austin F. Eggers & Peter A. Groothuis & Kurt W. Rotthoff, 2023. "The Flutie and Anti-Flutie Effect: The Impact of Football Championships and Athletic Malfeasance on the University," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 24(7), pages 903-931, October.
    11. Gaurab Aryal & Thayer Morrill & Peter Troyan, 2022. "Desirable Rankings," Papers 2205.11684, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2026.
    12. Brian Jacob & Brian McCall & Kevin Stange, 2018. "College as Country Club: Do Colleges Cater to Students’ Preferences for Consumption?," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 36(2), pages 309-348.
    13. Bornmann, Lutz & Leydesdorff, Loet & Wang, Jian, 2014. "How to improve the prediction based on citation impact percentiles for years shortly after the publication date?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(1), pages 175-180.
    14. Stan J. Liebowitz, 2014. "Willful Blindness: The Inefficient Reward Structure In Academic Research," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 52(4), pages 1267-1283, October.
    15. Matilde P. Machado & Ricardo Mora & Antonio Romero-Medina, 2012. "Can We Infer Hospital Quality From Medical Graduates’ Residency Choices?," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 10(6), pages 1400-1424, December.
    16. Moul, Charles C. & Nye, John V.C., 2009. "Did the Soviets collude? A statistical analysis of championship chess 1940-1978," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 70(1-2), pages 10-21, May.
    17. César Zamudio & Meg Meng, 2015. "Which Modeling Scholars Get Promoted, and How Fast?," Customer Needs and Solutions, Springer;Institute for Sustainable Innovation and Growth (iSIG), vol. 2(1), pages 91-104, March.
    18. Geert Campenhout & Tom Caneghem & Steve Uytbergen, 2008. "A comparison of overall and sub-area journal influence: The case of the accounting literature," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 77(1), pages 61-90, October.
    19. Tao, Hung-Lin, 2007. "Monetizing college reputation: The case of Taiwan's engineering and medical schools," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 26(2), pages 232-243, April.
    20. Csató, László & Tóth, Csaba, 2020. "University rankings from the revealed preferences of the applicants," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 286(1), pages 309-320.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:scippl:v:45:y:2018:i:4:p:503-514.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/spp .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.