Smart City Ranking Reliability Analysis

Smart cities are the future of our life. More and smarter initiatives and projects have been proposed during the past decades. The smart city ranking results play an important role in the study of smart cities because the performance of smart cities is significant for political decision making, organizational strategy planning, human being career, and living choose. There are quite a few smart city ranking results available. Such kind of evaluation is important to the future development of smart cities. However, different rankings may not be consistent with each other, which necessities the need for evaluating the smart city rankings. In this paper, we apply reliability analysis to test the reliability of the current smart city ranking models. A chi-square test for homogeneity is adopted. Our finding shows that currently published ranking results are not reliable. We analyze the reasons for causing such a problem and call for a more systematic study on evaluation criteria of smart cities.