How could more African universities appear in the Shangai ranking, with better scores?
In the latest 2020 edition of the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), also known as the Shanghai ranking, 16 African universities appeared among the top-listed 1,000 universities. This number is very small as compared to the total number of universities in Africa. Moreover, these institutions are situated in only four countries: South Africa (9), Egypt (5), Ethiopia (1), and Tunisia (1).
Actually, African universities appear in other rankings like THE (Times Higher Education), QS (QS World University Rankings), URAP (University Ranking by Academic Performance), U.S. News Education, etc. One can also mention rankings based on indicators like regional rankings, rankings by subject, etc.
In this paper we focus on the Shanghai Ranking, with an emphasis on an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of African universities through their evolution in the ranking over the last 17 years.
An extended ranking
From its creation in 2003 to 2016, the Shanghai Ranking was limited to the Top 500 universities in the world. In 2017 the list was extended to 800, and in 2018 to 1,000 universities.
The evolution of the number of ranked African universities is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Number of ranked African Universities by country for the period 2003-2020.
Six countries only
Twenty universities sited in 6 countries (South Africa, Egypt, Tunisia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Uganda) appear at least once in the ranking during the period 2003-2020. Among these countries, South Africa is the only one that appears in all years, with an increasing number of ranked universities (from 4 in 2003 to 9 in 2020).
Egyptian universities showed up for the first time in 2006, and then again in 2007, before leaving the ranking during the period 2008-2010, and reappearing in 2011 with a steady evolution reaching 5 universities in 2020. Tunisia joined the Top 1,000 list in 2018 and has maintained its presence to date. Universities in Uganda, Nigeria and Ethiopia have each made single-year contributions for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 respectively.
The scoring system
In order to make a comprehensive analysis of the ranking of African universities, there will be the need for a detailed analysis of the Shanghai scoring system. ARWU’s score is a weighted combination of 6 components divided into 4 fields:
- Quality of Education (10%): Alumni of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (Alumni 10%).
- Quality of Faculty (40%): Staff of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (Award 20%) and Highly cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories (HiCi 20%).
- Research Output (40%): Papers published in Nature and Science (N&S 20%) (Period 2015-2019 for 2020 Ranking) and papers published in journals indexed in Web Of Science within Science Citation Index-expanded and Social Science Citation Index (PUB 20%) (Year 2019 for 2020 Ranking)
- Per Capita Performance (10%): Per capita academic performance of an institution (PCP 10%).
In Figure 2, we display the components of the scores of the 16 African universities that appeared in the 2020 ranking.
Figure 2: Score components of the 16 ranked African universities arranged by decreasing rank categories.
Low marks
We can make the following remarks:
- Only 2 universities belong to the Top 300 group, 3 others are ranked in the 401-500 group, and the remaining 11 universities have a ranking above 500 and up to 1,000.
- None of the African universities could validate all the 6 components of the score. In particular, 7 universities appeared in the ranking with non-zero marks in only 2 fields (Research Output and Per Capita Performance). It is obvious that the two other fields (Quality of Education and Quality of Faculty) are the main weaknesses for most universities and significantly reduced their scores.
- The highest score for all ranked African universities is the PUB component (20% of the global score).
Very few Highly cited authors
The latter component is essential for a realistic improvement of the ranking of African universities, since the other scores--apart from that of the PCP--are very low, and even zero, for the majority of African universities ranked at least once since 2003 (20 universities). For instance, only 3 universities have a non-zero score for the HiCi (Highly cited authors) component. It will be very difficult for African universities to rely on the Alumni and Award components anytime soon.
We illustrate in Figure 3 the publication dynamics (articles published in the WOS indexed journals in the two databases concerned) of these 20 universities for the period 2002-2019 with respect to the Shanghai Ranking from 2003 to 2020. One can notice a global steady increase in the number of publications for all universities. However, more effort has to be put in for a higher contribution to the total score.
Figure 3: Total number of articles in Science Citation Index-Expanded and Social Science Citation Index (WOS 2002-2019) for the 9 African universities ranked in 2020 ARWU.
The N&S component score
Another way to improve the rankings of African universities could be through the improvement of the N&S component (in red in Figure 2). We present in Figure 4 the number of articles published in Nature and Science for the 20 African universities, for rolling 5-years periods according to the definition of the N&S component score.
Figure 4: Articles published in Nature and Science by the 20 African universities concerned so far by ARWU rankings, for rolling 5-years periods from 2011 to 2019.
The importance to publish more
The importance of this component is obvious in the case of major South Africa universities, for instance, and is significantly much weaker for the other universities. In addition to high-level domestic research, it is very important that African universities enhance their collaborations with the best universities in the world, through cooperation projects, so they can publish in these prestigious journals and subsequently improve their rankings.
In conclusion, despite an increase in the number of the African universities in the Shanghai ARWU rankings, it is important to note that this may be as a result of the increase in the number of ranked universities from 500 to 1,000, allowing for 11 African universities to show up in the 2020 edition. Nevertheless, a global improvement of the performances of African universities can be seen and should be encouraged, mainly through the improvement of publication records, especially in Nature and Science journals.
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This article has first been published by the African Physics Newsletter - © American Physical Society, 2021 - All figures have been produced by H. El Fekih.