John DiMarco on Computing (and occasionally other things)
I welcome comments by email to jdd at cs.toronto.edu.

Thu 09 Mar 2017 12:58

A closer look at topuniversities.com's 2017 rankings for Computer Science.

The QS World University Rankings for 2017 are out, including the subject rankings. For the subject "Computer Science & Information Systems", the University of Toronto does very well, placing tenth.

A closer look at the top ten shows some expected leaders (MIT, Stanford, CMU, UC Berkeley) but some less expected ones, such as Oxford and Cambridge. These are superb Universities with good Computer Science programs, but are their CS programs really among the ten best in the world?

A closer look at how the score is computed sheds some light on this question. The Overall Score is a combination of Academic Reputation, Citations per Paper, Employer Reputation, and H-index Citations. Academic Reputation and Employer Reputation are, in essence, the opinions of professors and employers respectively. While (hopefully) they are reasonably well founded opinions, this is a subjective, not an objective, metric. On the other hand, Citations per Paper and H-index Citations are objective. So I looked at Citations per Paper and H-index Citations for the top forty schools on the 2017 QS Computer Science & Information Systems ranking.

By Citations per Paper, top five of those forty are:

  1. Princeton
  2. Stanford
  3. UT Austin
  4. Washington
  5. UC Berkeley

No MIT? This seems off. So lets look at the top five by H-Index Citations:

  1. Stanford
  2. MIT
  3. UC Berkeley
  4. UI Urbana-Champaign
  5. UT Austin

That looks more reasonable. So let's look at the top twenty by H-Index Citations:

  1. Stanford
  2. MIT
  3. UC Berkeley
  4. UI Urbana-Champaign
  5. UT Austin
  6. Georgia IT
  7. CMU
  8. Tsinghua
  9. Nanyang
  10. ETH Zurich
  11. Washington
  12. Princeton
  13. UBC
  14. Toronto
  15. Waterloo
  16. NU Singapore
  17. UC London
  18. Cornell
  19. UCLA
  20. CU Hong Kong

That's a list that makes more sense to me. While it puts my department 14th instead of 10th, I think I have more confidence in the objectivity of this ordering than I do in the QS Overall Score ordering.

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