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Research Evaluation

mission of the university. In the next sections we will briefly discuss the
methods used to derive these rankings and present the Van Parijs typology
of worldwide university rankings (Van Parijs, 2009). Finally, following
Van Parijs (2009) and Loobuyck (2009) we put the ranking phenomenon
in an ethical perspective. A strong relation between the mission of a uni-
versity, the idea of an ideal university and its ranking according to certain
indicators is put forward.

8.4.2 The Main Worldwide University Rankings

Although more and more rankings are published, we just mention some
of the more important ones.
• The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), informally
known as the Shanghai ranking. This is the ranking drawn since 2003
by the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong
University: http://www.arwu.org/
• The World University Ranking of the Times Higher Education
(THE), formerly the THES, drawn since 2004 in collaboration with a
private company QS (Quacquarelli Symonds). In November 2009 this
collaboration has been stopped. Since then THE collaborated with
Thomson Reuters, but switched to Scopus in 2015. The ranking can
be found at: http://www.topuniversities.com/. QS has now its own
QS World University Rankings to be found at: https://www.topuni-
versities.com/university-rankings.
• The Leiden Ranking: CWTS’ rankings (note the plural) available
since 2008 at http://www.cwts.nl/ranking/
• A somewhat special case is the World Universities’ Ranking on the
Web. This list is based on Internet web presence. It is the result of
investigations performed at the Cybermetrics Lab (Madrid, Spain)
under the direction of Isidro Aguillo. This list exists since 2004 and is
updated twice a year see http://www.webometrics.info/
• The Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities,
drawn since 2007 by the Higher Education Evaluation &
Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT): http://ranking.heeact.
edu.tw/
• Since September 2009 the SIR (SCImago Institutions Ranking) has
joined the set of worldwide university rankings: http://www.scimagoir.
com/. Their report ranks more than 5100 research institutions and orga-
nizations and this in different ways. It takes research performance,