A fresh approach to evaluating the academic ranking of world universities

The aim of this article is to present new ideas in evaluating Shanghai University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). One issue frequently put forth in various publications is that the Shanghai rankings are sensitive to the relative weight they attribute to each variable. As a possible remedy to this issue, the statistical I-distance method is proposed to be used. Based on a sample containing the top 100 ranked universities, the results show a significant correlation with the official ARWU list. However, some inconsistencies concerning European universities have been noticed and elaborated upon.