6 Global University Rankings: Impacts and Applications

In December 2011, the journal Science published the information that two Saudi-Arabian universities were massively recruiting highly cited research stars from Cambridge, Harvard, and other universities who had made it onto the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) list of most frequently cited researchers. For about $70,000 per year, they were offered an affiliation to these universities in exchange for the obligation to be present once a year for a short time and to indicate in all their publications their affiliation to the respective Saudi-Arabian university. The result was that within two to three years both institutions made it from not listed at all into the group of the top two hundred to three hundred in the Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). Thus universities are buying the reputation of researchers in order to increase their own reputation. Not all researchers who were contacted could be bought. However, in March 2012, the largest Australian newspaper, The Australian, published a list of sixty frequently cited researchers who had been appointed as “distinguished scientists” at one of the two Saudi-Arabian universities. Altogether the list comprises a number of researchers from top universities in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. All of them are men, and some are already retired.