POSTECH Ranked 53rd in the World, 6th in Asia
POSTECH Ranked 53rd in the World, 6th in Asia
  • Reporter Jung Han-kyu
  • 승인 2011.10.12 19:50
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Top Asian University to Produce Quality Citations

POSTECH has once again proven itself as one the world’s leading research-oriented universities on The Times Higher Education World University Rankings for 2011-2012, released on Oct. 6. This year, POSTECH was ranked 53rd in the world overall, 6th in Asia, but 1st in the Citations category in Asia. Amongst other Korean universities, KAIST was ranked 94th and Seoul National University 124th in world ranking.

Powered by Thomson Reuters Compared, a global information provider, The Times Higher Education World University Rankings evaluates world universities by the following five categories: citations, research, teaching, industry income, and international outlook .

Compared to the 2010-2011 rankings, the top Asian universities received improved scores in most of the categories, but poorer in Citations. All of POSTECH’s scores, except for Industry Income, have also dropped by a small margin. Despite its downturn in rankings, POSTECH substantially outscored other Asian universities in Citations, with a score of 92. The general trend in those that ranked higher than POSTECH was having balanced scores in all five categories, whereas POSTECH showed a heavy emphasis in Industry Income and Citations.

The evaluation methods are updated and polished every year in order to rate the  different characteristics of universities more fairer.

Citations (30%)
This category mainly assesses the influence of the university’s research papers. The Higher Education calculated average citations per paper, instead of citations per size of the university, to minimize the disadvantage that could arise from the size differences. They also took measures to reflect disparities in citation volume between different subject areas. One of the two changes made this year was extending the number of years of which they collected the citations to six years. The second change was excluding all the universities that did not publish 200 papers a year. These changes were made to increase the stability of the results and reduce the impact of exceptionally highly cited papers on institutional overall scores.

Teaching (30%)
A large portion of the evaluation is based on the Academic Reputation Survey, a worldwide poll of experienced scholars, carried out by Thomson Reuters in spring 2011. In the survey asking about the prestige of universities in both research and teaching, 17,554 scholars responded, which is a 30 percent upsurge from 2010. The Teaching category takes into account the ratio of staff to total students, ratio of Doctorate degrees to Bachelor’s degrees awarded, number of total Doctorate degrees awarded, and the measure of institutional income.

Research (30%)
The results of the Academic Reputational Survey were also used heavily in this assessment. In this category the quality of the research conducted by the institution, considering the research income and research papers published in academic journals, is scaled against the total staff numbers, in addition to the survey results.

International Outlook (7.5%)
This category assess the extent of the university’s globalization by measuring the ratio of international students to domestic students, the ratio of international staff to domestic staff, and the number of research journal publications with at least one international co-author.

Industry Income (2.5%)
The final category gauges the involvement of the university in innovations, inventions, and consultancy for the industry. It also reflects how much businesses are willing to pay for research and a university’s ability to attract funding.

As POSTECH has been putting a considerable amount of effort into globalization, the evaluation reflected in the rankings spoke otherwise. However, POSTECH’s performance is outstanding considering the fact that it received close to no recommendations in the Academic Reputation Survey, while KAIST and SNU did receive some. Bearing in mind that POSTECH is a research-oriented school that actively participates in academic-industrial collaborations, it is encouraging that POSTECH is recognized for its effort in those areas.