The World-Class Multiversity: Global commonalities and national characteristics

World-Class Universities (WCUs) are nationally embedded comprehensive higher education institutions (HEIs) that are closely engaged in the global knowledge system. The article reviews the conditions of possibility and evolution of WCUs. Three interpretations are used to explain worldwide higher education: neoliberal theory, institutional theory, and critical political economy, which give greater recognition than the other theories to the role of the state and variations between states. World higher education is evolving under conditions of globalization, organizational modernization (the New Public Management), and in some countries, marketization. These larger conditions have become manifest in higher education in three widespread tendencies: massification, the WCU movement, and organizational expansion. The last includes the strengthening of the role of the large multi-disciplinary multi-purpose HEIs ("multiversities"), in the form of both research-intensive WCUs with significant global presence, and other HEIs. The role of binary sector and specialist HEIs has declined. Elite WCUs gain status and strategic advantage in both quantity and quality: through growth and the expansion of scope, and through selectivity and research concentration. The balance between quantity and quality is now resolved at larger average size and broader scope than before. The final section of the article reviews WCUs in China and considers whether they might constitute a distinctive university model

Citation analysis of scientific categories

Databases catalogue the corpus of research literature into scientific categories and report classes of bibliometric data such as the number of citations to articles, the number of authors, journals, funding agencies, institutes, references, etc. The number of articles and citations in a category are gauges of productivity and scientific impact but a quantitative basis to compare researchers between categories is limited. Here, we compile a list of bibliometric indicators for 236 science categories and citation rates of the 500 most cited articles of each category. The number of citations per paper vary by several orders of magnitude and are highest in multidisciplinary sciences, general internal medicine, and biochemistry and lowest in literature, poetry, and dance. A regression model demonstrates that citation rates to the top articles in each category increase with the square root of the number of articles in a category and decrease proportionately with the age of the references: articles in categories that cite recent research are also cited more frequently. The citation rate correlates positively with the number of funding agencies that finance the research. The category h-index correlates with the average number of cites to the top 500 ranked articles of each category (R2=0.997). Furthermore, only a few journals publish the top 500 cited articles in each category: four journals publish 60% (σ=±20%) of these and ten publish 81% (σ=±15%)

Why do Australian universities fare so poorly in international rankings? Evidence for economic departments and some hypotheses

This paper reviews the literature that ranks universities and economics departments. In international rankings Australian universities fare well, but the most popular (ARWU and THES) measures are biased in ways that favour Australian universities. In international rankings of economics departments by their research performance, Australian universities fare poorly, relative to natural comparators. Several hypotheses can explain this phenomenon: inappropriate measures, low productivity, time spent on non-research activities, age and cohort effects and lack of resources.Richard Pomfre