Measuring the academic reputation through citation networks via PageRank

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to measure academic reputation using PageRank on citation networks, providing a quantitative, data-driven alternative to traditional university rankings, and shows strong correlation with established rankings.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach applying PageRank to citation networks across disciplines to quantify institutional reputation based solely on bibliometric data.

Findings

PageRank-based reputation correlates strongly with ARWU rankings.

The method provides a statistically robust, bias-resistant measure of academic prestige.

It offers a new quantitative tool for university ranking methodologies.

Abstract

The objective assessment of the prestige of an academic institution is a difficult and hotly debated task. In the last few years, different types of University Rankings have been proposed to quantify the excellence of different research institutions in the world. Albeit met with criticism in some cases, the relevance of university rankings is being increasingly acknowledged: indeed, rankings are having a major impact on the design of research policies, both at the institutional and governmental level. Yet, the debate on what rankings are {\em exactly} measuring is enduring. Here, we address the issue by measuring a quantitive and reliable proxy of the academic reputation of a given institution and by evaluating its correlation with different university rankings. Specifically, we study citation patterns among universities in five different Web of Science Subject Categories and use the \pr~algorithm on the five resulting citation networks. The rationale behind our work is that scientific citations are driven by the reputation of the reference so that the PageRank algorithm is expected to yield a rank which reflects the reputation of an academic institution in a specific field. Our results allow to quantifying the prestige of a set of institutions in a certain research field based only on hard bibliometric data. Given the volume of the data analysed, our findings are statistically robust and less prone to bias, at odds with ad--hoc surveys often employed by ranking bodies in order to attain similar results. Because our findings are found to correlate extremely well with the ARWU Subject rankings, the approach we propose in our paper may open the door to new, Academic Ranking methodologies that go beyond current methods by reconciling the qualitative evaluation of Academic Prestige with its quantitative measurements via publication impact.