new sociology rankings and it’s kind of interesting

Shanghai Jiao Tong University runs an annual ranking of universities called the “Academic Ranking of World Universities.” They rank departments in the following way:

• Articles in Web of Science
• A normalized citation score/impact factor
• International collaboration (i.e., people from different countries in author list)
• Hits in their definition of “top journals”
• Awards given to faculty

This all makes sense to me, except the international collaboration score. It’s interesting, but I am not sure why it should be counted toward an estimate of a program’s prestige or output. Maybe it is ARWU’s way to helping out non-Anglophone nations. We could kvetch about the exclusion of books, but ARWU does what it does. At least they are honest about it and I feel pretty good that an organization can scrape Web of Science, while chasing down books is hard to do.

Here is the sociology global top 25, based on their composite score. Sociology programs were not ranked in terms of awards.

Comments in no particular order:

1. Your school probably got bumped down just due to numbers. Even if we stick just to the Anglophone world, the inclusion of Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Toronto, and others will likely push down your school a few notches.
2. Bizarrely, IU (my employer) shows that no matter what rank you use – NRC, USNWR, or ARWU – it loves hovering in that 11-13 zone. I’ve seen it as low #18 in some survers, like NRC 2010.
3. My alma mater: Chicago – rank 20! This may shock some folks, but it is not a surprise to disciplinary insiders. A lot of star faculty left in the late 1990s and 2000s and these people were running big projects or were younger people who would go on to do big things at other places. The young folks at Chicago are A+ but they haven’t quite reached the age where they are helming massive projects that generate avalanches of publications (a la Laumann circa 1995 or Bob Sampson 2004).
4. Aside from Chicago, Princeton is the other weird one. It makes sense that Princeton would be top 20 in the world, but they are usually considered the top of the heap in the US. If you look at the individual scores, you see they do really badly in “PUB” but have insanely high impact – “CNCI.” Makes sense since they have multiple star faculty who write occasionally, rather than in a stream like a demographer.
5. The nice thing about this ranking is that aside from including international collaboration, there seems to be little weird about it. The NRC 2010 ranking was a huge failure in that it produced some utterly weird and bizarre outputs, like making Delaware a top 20 program (no offense!). Simply by counting cites and pubs, you get something that actually makes sense to insiders and the inputs have an internal logic.
6. Finally, it is interesting to see that even with international collaboration, top non-US schools are Anglophone, except Amsterdam. It is a really interesting question why sociology has become so concentrated in Anglophone nations, while other fields have prominent non-Anglo schools. For example, in math, the top 25 includes Paris, Kyoto and the Hebrew University.

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