Skyline-Based University Rankings

Abstract

University rankings comprise a significant tool in making decisions in our modern educational process. In this paper, we propose a novel university ranking method based on the skyline operator, which is used on multi-dimensional objects to extract the non-dominated (i.e.“prevailing") ones. Our method is characterized by several advantages, such as: it is transparent, reproducible, without any arbitrarily selected parameters, based on the research output of universities only and not on publicly not traceable or random questionnaires. Our method does not provide meaningless absolute rankings but rather it ranks universities categorized in equivalence classes. We evaluate our method experimentally with data extracted from Microsoft Academic. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.