Global University Ranking System : An Approach by Combining Academic Performance and Web-Based Indicators

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Increasing market-based orientation and international character of higher education institutions around the globe have led students, universities and governments to take a great interest in knowing the position that a particular center, university or other higher education entity have in comparison with other entities. With the massive number of universities practically in every continent, the initiatives to obtain independent analysis of the quality of universities have increased rapidly in recent years across many nations.
The Web is becoming the most important scholarly communication tool and it makes more and more scientific information accessible. In recent years, university Web rankings have become in importance around the world. The central hypothesis of the ranking is that the university’s web presence reflects its global performance, the quality of its departments and services, the impact of its outputs and its international prestige. One of the most important dimensions in university Website ranking is visibility factor and usability.
University websites are increasingly used for a wide variety of purposes, such as uploading the prospectus, library catalogue, promote achievement of individuals, research groups, new publications, etc. Therefore, there is a necessity and desire to know about websites of academic organizations.
Global university rankings have cemented the notion of a world university market arranged in a single “league table” for comparative purposes and have given a powerful impetus to intranational and international competitive pressures in the sector.
The studies on evaluationof academic productivity and quality and web presence have led to development of new academicfields such as Bibliometrics, Scientometrics,Informetrics and Webometrics.
During the last thirty years, as an outcome of these new emerging academic fields, severaluniversity ranking systems have been developed both at national and global level.Although these university ranking systems have attracted attention; they have beencriticized due to a number of issues such as inappropriateness of indicators chosen,scoring procedure adopted, weighting, etc. In this study, a combined academic and web performance evaluationand global ranking system has been developed and implemented using data mining. The new global system whichprocesses about more than5,000 world universities is based on data from non-subjective,reliable and universally accepted online sources. The scoring procedure includesstatistical analysis and data has been collected via a tool developed for this purposeto eliminate human errors.
Keywords: University ranking, Web performance, Academic performance, League tables

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Chapter 1 Introduction = 1
• Chapter 2 Literature Survey = 7
• 2.1. Related Disciplines = 7
• 2.2. Indicator Terminology = 12
• 2.3. Data Mining and Clustering = 14
• 2.4.University Ranking = 15
• Chapter 3 Global University Ranking by combining Academic Performance and Web-Based Indicators Using Data Mining = 44
• 3.1.A Study on Korean Universities = 45
• 3.2.A New System for Global Ranking Methodology = 48
• Chapter 4 Statistical Analysis and Clustering = 59
• 4.1.Descriptive Statistics = 59
• 4.2.Modified Scoring System = 67
• 4.3. Clustering = 69
• Chapter 5 Results and Discussion = 73
• 5.1.Ranking Results = 73
• 5.2.Discussions on Ranking Results = 75
• Chapter 6 Conclusions and Future Works = 79
• 6.1. Conclusions = 79
• 6.2. Future Works = 80
• References = 81
• Abstract = 86
• Acknowledgements = 88