Shanghai rankings account for the number of Nobel Prize / Fields Medal winners, meaning they look at how good the institution was historically, rather than purely how good it is now. If you rank universities by current research output, such as the Leiden Ranking, it’s a very different picture.
Unfortunately while there are many alternative approaches of equal or greater value than the Shanghai rankings, approaches using straight citation analysis really aren’t among them. It’s one of the most criticized methodologies for some very good reasons and, while Leiden does better than most at controlling for things like citation mills, their methodology has some really glaring flaws (their criteria for designating “core journals,” for example). This is one of the most interesting topics in meta-academics right now, and as is shown in this somewhat infamous paper from fudan university the reason is that impact is a great deal more complicated than any simple metric can represent.
Shanghai rankings account for the number of Nobel Prize / Fields Medal winners, meaning they look at how good the institution was historically, rather than purely how good it is now. If you rank universities by current research output, such as the Leiden Ranking, it’s a very different picture.
Unfortunately while there are many alternative approaches of equal or greater value than the Shanghai rankings, approaches using straight citation analysis really aren’t among them. It’s one of the most criticized methodologies for some very good reasons and, while Leiden does better than most at controlling for things like citation mills, their methodology has some really glaring flaws (their criteria for designating “core journals,” for example). This is one of the most interesting topics in meta-academics right now, and as is shown in this somewhat infamous paper from fudan university the reason is that impact is a great deal more complicated than any simple metric can represent.