Heading Towards Sub-Discipline Rankings for Higher Education Institutions

Although the system for annual rankings of higher education institutions (HEIs) faces considerable criticism, these rankings are here to stay. Having become competent in assigning holistic ranking scores to HEIs, reputed ranking entities have now started focusing on subject-specific and regional rankings. However, in experts’ opinion, the process of assigning rankings should be more consistent, transparent, and representative. This study focuses on enhancing the credibility of the academic ranking process, by performing fine-grained assessment of the academic data pertaining to the computing discipline. The proposed assessment approach explores the data at the sub-discipline level, analyzing several ranking dimensions, including the research productivity, research impact, and research contribution of influential research scholars affiliated with renowned HEIs in the computing discipline. The analysis considers highly curated data published by three well-known international academic ranking entities, namely, Academic Rankings of World Universities (ARWU), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), and Times Higher Education (THE), in 2018, 2019, and 2020, respectively. Researchers’ profiles are obtained from the Scopus repository, and the DBpedia repository is used to retrieve information about HEIs and their locations. For a stable comparison of the subject-specific academic rankings, the grand average rank measure is employed, whereas for finding the most influential researchers in computing, the ResRank measure is used. The sub-discipline-specific academic rankings provide more detailed insight into the academic rankings, thereby providing more robust decision support. This analysis, which focuses on the computing sub-discipline, is among the first few such efforts.