Relationship between bibliometric indicators and university ranking positions

A growing interest for demonstrating prestige and status of higher education institutions has spurred the establishment of several international ranking systems. A major percentage of these rankings include parameters related to scientific productivity. Here, we examined the differences between diverse rankings as well as correlation with bibliometric parameters and disciplines for the top universities. We investigated the top 300 universities from four international rankings, the Times Higher Education World University Ranking (THE), the QS World University Rankings (QS) the ShanghaiRanking-Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) and the U.S.News Best Global Universities Ranking (USNews). The assessed parameters include ranking positions, size related and bibliometrics-related indicators of each selected ranking. The weight of scientometric parameters ranges between 20% (QS) and 75% (USNews). The most important parameters defining ranking positions include citations, international reputation, and the number of researchers, but the correlation strength varies among ranking systems. The absolute number of publications and citations are particularly important in ARWU and USNews rankings, and scientific category normalized (field weighted) citation impact is central in THE and USNews rankings. Our results confirm that universities having outstanding results in rankings using size-independent indicators (QS and THE) compared to others have significantly lower number of students. High impact research can improve position in ARWU and USNews ranking lists. Regarding to different disciplines, the main results show that outstanding universities in THE ranking have higher publication activity in social sciences and universities which perform better in USNews and QS ranking have more publications in science, technology, and medicine fields and lower score in social sciences. In brief, here we present a comprehensive analysis of the correlation between scientometric parameters and university ranking positions, as well as the performance of outstanding universities and their correlation with different disciplines, to help decision makers select parameters for strengthening and to attract the interest of prospective students and their parents via a better understanding of the functions of different ranks.