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The latest Scimago Institutions Rankings show that, when sheer quantity of research is considered, non-university research centres are increasingly important. For production of papers, the top three places go to the National Centre for Scientific Research in France, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences while several government research centres, medical institutes and hospitals can be found in the top 100 of the Production indicator. Looking at the ranking of universities only, the top 20 for output of papers show that American dominance is becoming less pronounced while the Chinese presence is more noticeable.
There are eight US, four Chinese, three British and two Japanese institutions among the top 20 universities with one each from Canada, Brazil and France. The first five places go to Harvard, Tokyo, Toronto, Sao Paulo and Tsinghua.
Source SCIMAGO Institutions Rankings.

By Ben Etherington. FEDERAL parliament sits next week and on the menu is Christopher Pyne’s reform package for higher education. There will be a debate, but from the perspective of many who care about universities, it will be a pseudo-debate. It will concern not the framework of policy, but the mode of distribution of resources within a conception of higher education provision on which the two major parties have long been in agreement. More...

HEFCE welcomes the new streamlined guidance for the Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) published by the TRAC Development Group (TDG). This will apply for reporting from the academic year 2014-15 onwards.
See the new TRAC Guidance. More...

In November 2013 we sent ‘Recurrent teaching grant from 2015-16’ (HEFCE Circular letter 30/2013), to notify institutions of our proposals for distributing recurrent teaching grant from 2015-16 onwards. Our aim was to simplify the process that had been in place since 2012-13 to manage the transfer of a sizeable proportion of higher education funding from HEFCE grants to student fees. We invited comment on our proposals, which informed the plans that were put to the HEFCE Board. More...