The ranking that generally gets cited to that end judges universities by research output, which is generally not what you’re looking for when you’re looking for a good education – you want a university that’s good at teaching, not good at producing papers and citations. You want a professor that’s not busy producing papers, because they were hired to produce papers, you want one that actually teaches.
It’s also slanted heavily in favour of Anglo countries when it comes to looking at the “producing papers” metric alone: Pretty much all other countries produce the bulk of their papers at research institutes, which don’t show up in the list because they’re not universities. If they were included IIRC Max Planck would top the list. Granted, that’s also to a large degree because they’re absolutely massive, a large number of institutes under a common roof.
The citations metric is also slanted, because pretty much all countries will cite english papers regardless of the language of the paper being written, but all non anglo countries also produce a significant part of papers in the local language, which are much less likely to get cited.
Nope. Or at least not necessarily.
The ranking that generally gets cited to that end judges universities by research output, which is generally not what you’re looking for when you’re looking for a good education – you want a university that’s good at teaching, not good at producing papers and citations. You want a professor that’s not busy producing papers, because they were hired to produce papers, you want one that actually teaches.
It’s also slanted heavily in favour of Anglo countries when it comes to looking at the “producing papers” metric alone: Pretty much all other countries produce the bulk of their papers at research institutes, which don’t show up in the list because they’re not universities. If they were included IIRC Max Planck would top the list. Granted, that’s also to a large degree because they’re absolutely massive, a large number of institutes under a common roof.
The citations metric is also slanted, because pretty much all countries will cite english papers regardless of the language of the paper being written, but all non anglo countries also produce a significant part of papers in the local language, which are much less likely to get cited.