Kritik af rankings

I sidste nummer af World University News gør Uwe Brandenburg (her) sig nogle tanker om de store universitets-rankings én-dimensionalitet, bl.a. dette:

"First, we do not believe in the ranking of entire higher education institutions. This is mainly due to the fact that such a ranking necessarily blurs the differences within an institution. For us, the target group has to be the starting point of any ranking exercise. Thus, one can fairly argue that it does not help a student looking for a physics department to learn that university A is average when in fact the physics department is outstanding, the sociology appalling and the rest is mediocre.
It is the old problem of the man with his head in the fire and the feet in the freezer. A doctor would diagnose that the man is in a serious condition while a statistician might claim that overall he is doing fine."

Det samme kan siges om ministeriets og regeringens fantasme om "Basismidler efter kvalitet", som går ud på at ranke de danske universiteter efter en række indikatorer, herunder "den bibliometriske forskningsindikator", og disses indbyrdes (politisk bestemte) vægtning, for så at fordele det, der tidligere var basismidler, efter den nye algoritme. Som Uwe Brandenburg bemærker om det parallelle problem:

"Second, we do not create values by weighing indicators and then calculating an overall value. Why is that? The main reason is that any weight is necessarily arbitrary, or in other words political. The person weighing decides which weight to give. By doing so, you pre-decide the outcome of any ranking. You make it even worse when you then add the different values together and create one overall value because this blurs differences between individual indicators.
Say a discipline is publishing a lot but nobody reads it. If you give publications a weight of 2 and citations a weight of one, it will look like the department is very strong. If you do it the other way, it will look pretty weak. If you add the values you make it even worse because you blur the difference between both performances."

Lad bibliometrien blive et redskab i selve forskningen, og i dens formidling. Fint, hvis humanistisk og samfundsvidenskabelig forskning gøres mere synlig. Men drop tanken om at rangordne universiteter og arrangere konkurrencer om indikator-point.