Ranking’s research impact indicator is still skewed

By Richard Holmes. A depressing thing about the international university ranking business is the gullibility of university administrators and academic commentators.
A case in point is the reaction to the recent Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, which appeared to show some Asian and continental European universities rising over the past year at the expense of their Anglo-Saxon competitors.
In fact, much of the improvement of many universities was just the result of a change in the method of calculating the scores for the ranking’s two reputational surveys, which boosted the scores of those with modest reputations.
Also, some universities received implausibly high scores for the research impact indicator, which is measured by normalised citations and which THE considers to be the flagship of the rankings.
I have calculated the world's top universities for research impact according to this indicator in this year's THE World University Rankings. The indicator, which was prepared by Thomson Reuters, accounts for 30% of the total ranking, a lot more than any other. The data is from the profiles that can be accessed by clicking on the top 400 universities.
Here are the top 20.
1- Rice University
1- Moscow (State) Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI)
3- University of California Santa Cruz
3- MIT
5- Princeton University
6- Caltech
7- University of California Santa Barbara
7- Stanford University
9- University of California Berkeley
10- Harvard University
11- Royal Holloway London
12- University of Chicago
13- Northwestern University
14- Tokyo Metropolitan University
14- University of Colorado Boulder
16- University of Washington Seattle
16- Duke University
18- University of California San Diego
18- University of Pennsylvania
18- Cambridge University. More...