Forum Post
Good news for WSU – WSU Nets Top 100 Ranking Among U.S. Universities – WSU Insider
Response
For insight into the research.com university ranking methodology, scroll down to the section on university rankings from this link. Note that research.com rankings include “leading scholars” rather than all faculty at a university.
Christine Horne
Faculty Senate Chair
Comments
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I haven’t heard of Research.com or the data source they use (Microsoft Academic Graph). There are a number of faculty missing in the identification of “active” scholars based on Google Scholar h-index metrics. I am curious if there is a way to update the underlying data.
I certainly appreciate efforts aimed at highlighting the WSU research enterprise but on this occasion am concerned that we have missed the mark. Perhaps others had heard of Research.com but, like Glen Duncan, I was unaware. A quick look into how the rankings are determined reveals that they are based on “a sum of H-index values of every leading scientist affiliated with a given university”. Determination of who is a leading scientist by Research.com appears to be from discipline h-index (D-index) metrics that were generated by Microsoft Academic Graph, an AI platform that was sunset on December 31, 2021, and appears to be no longer searchable or updatable. Of concern is that many WSU researchers with h-index metrics (calculated by Google Scholar, Web of Science, etc.) that would meet the threshold listed by Research.com of 30-40 are not included as leading scientists. The use of a D-index to define a leading scientist is not sufficient as it only considers papers and citations for a specific discipline rather than an h-index that accounts for publication metrics across all disciplines. Thus, it is likely that several of our faculty who publish heavily in multidisciplinary journals or spread their portfolio across multiple disciplines were not identified as leading scientists in a specific discipline by Microsoft Academic Graph before it was ended and therefore not included in the Research.com rankings. Research.com also reports that “Only active scientists are considered. We exclude scientists who passed away or scholars who have not made a research publication during the last five years”. This is clearly not the case as several leading scientists listed for WSU passed away or retired many years ago. Overall, I find Research.com rankings to be unsuitable for defining a university’s research impact and encourage the WSU community to take the shortcomings into account when assigning value to the information it provides.