User:Oanyeu/HEEACT - Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities

The Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities is produced by the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT). This project employs bibliometric methods to analyze and rank the scientific papers performances of the top 500 worlds' universities and the top 300 worlds' universities among six fields. This performance ranking system is designed for research universities. The objective indicators used in this ranking system measure both long-term and short-term research performance of each university. The 2007 ranking methodology favored toward universities with medical schools. From 2008 HEEACT began to provide fields based rankings in addition to the overall performance ranking of each university. The rankings of six fields are based on the subject categorization of WOS, including Agriculture & Environment Sciences (AGE)、Clinical Medicine (MED)、Engineering, Computing & Technology (ENG)、Life Sciences (LIFE)、Natural Sciences (SCI) and Social Sciences (SOC).

Weighting
The 2009 performance measures are composed of eight indicators. The indicators together represent three different criteria of scientific papers performance: research productivity, research impact, and research excellence:

Features
This project employs quantitative data drawn from Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) to evaluate and rank the scientific paper performance for the top 500 universities worldwide and the top 300 worlds' universities among six fields. Different from the QS World University Rankings by Times Higher Education Supplement which focuses on university ranking and the Academic Ranking of World Universities by Shanghai Jiao Tong University which focuses on academic ranking, this project focuses on scientific papers performance ranking. The emphasis on current research performance makes the indicators a fairer one than some traditional indicators which tend to favor universities with longer histories or universities in developed countries. Generally speaking, the indicators used in this project have at least the following three features:
 * 1) Emphasize the quality of research - the indicators assessing research quality (research impact and research excellence) account for 80% of the performance score.
 * 2) Neutralize biases caused by the university size or faculty number.
 * 3) Take into account a university’s short-term research performance (constituting 55% of the score), thus ensuring a more objective comparison between universities of various lengths of history.

Commentary
The Australian higher education indicated that the 2007 performance ranking of scientific papers for world universities produced by HEEACT is a useful addition to the two present world university ranks because of its rigorous method and robust results, which are made possible by its more modest scope. Besides, several people also commented on the HEEACT rankings. The senior research fellow of Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, Wu Yi-shan, claimed that the HEEACT ranking is the best ranking system he has ever seen. Wu indicated that the HEEACT ranking considers both long term and short term performance of a university. The idea of combining long term and short term ranking indicators is a pioneering thought. Richard Holmes posted on University Ranking Watchand said “although the Shanghai rankings show a high correlation with other rankings (based on a tiny sample of US universities) the HEEACT rankings from Taiwan do somewhat better.” And Vice-President Research for the University of Toronto, Professor Paul Young said “the HEEACT rankings are relatively new, they are an important and methodologically robust measure of the quantity and quality of research performed by universities around the world.” Also, dean of academic affairs at National Taiwan University, Chiang Been-Huang said “2009 Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities by HEEACT are conducted based on objective figures.”