Academic rankings

I do not like academic rankings.

Academic Rankings Considered Harmful! clearly summarises ideas I believe in: “An academic decision is typically a multi-objective optimization problem, in which the objective function is highly personal. A unidimensional ranking provides a seductively easy objective function to optimize. Yet such decision making ignores the complex interplay between individual preferences and programs’ unique patterns of strengths and weaknesses. Decision making by ranking is decision making by lazy minds, I believe”.

I especially like its summary: “Academic rankings are harmful, I believe. We have a responsibility to better inform the public, by ceasing to play the ranking games and by providing the public with relevant information”.

These opinions were expressed in the context of university rankings. Ranking departments and people in the same way can be even worse. This is especially bad when the ranking is strongly based on quantitative measures, as in CSRankings and CSIndexbr.

However, in case you find yourself in some kind of trap that explicitly goes against well thought recommendation (Stop the numbers game; Favor quality and impact; Journal impact factor is not a good proxy for paper quality) for not assessing research quantitatively, these two rankings might be useful. Try, though, to escape from the trap in the first place.