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Comprehensive world university ranking based on ranking aggregation

Author

Listed:
  • Yang Zhang

    (College of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology)

  • Yu Xiao

    (College of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology)

  • Jun Wu

    (Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai
    Changsha University)

  • Xin Lu

    (College of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology)

Abstract

Many university rankings have been proposed in recent decades. The remarkable divergence among various rankings leads to confusion for decision-makers. In this paper, we propose to generate a comprehensive world university ranking by aggregating existing individual university rankings. We present a new graph-based rank aggregation method by defining a competition graph of universities, in which each node represents a university and each directed edge represents an outranking relation between two universities. We propose to measure the quality of a university by the out-in degree ratio based on which we rank all universities. Moreover, We evaluate the effectiveness of our comprehensive world university ranking from the perspectives of normality and impartiality, respectively. It is shown that the aggregated ranking will be applied as a blend integrating all the information from individual university rankings and can efficiently eliminate the outliers and regional partiality as a “smoother”.

Suggested Citation

  • Yang Zhang & Yu Xiao & Jun Wu & Xin Lu, 2021. "Comprehensive world university ranking based on ranking aggregation," Computational Statistics, Springer, vol. 36(2), pages 1139-1152, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:compst:v:36:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s00180-020-01033-8
    DOI: 10.1007/s00180-020-01033-8
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    References listed on IDEAS

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