{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,30]],"date-time":"2026-03-30T21:54:56Z","timestamp":1774907696917,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":38,"publisher":"Emerald","issue":"2","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2021,1,1]],"date-time":"2021-01-01T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1609459200000},"content-version":"tdm","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/www.emerald.com\/insight\/site-policies"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["LHT"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2023,6,1]]},"abstract":"<jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Purpose<\/jats:title><jats:p>Academic rankings are facing various issues, including the use of data sources that are not publicly verifiable, subjective parameters, a narrow focus on research productivity and regional biases and so forth. This research work is intended to enhance creditability of the ranking process by using the objective indicators based on publicly verifiable data sources.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Design\/methodology\/approach<\/jats:title><jats:p>The proposed ranking methodology \u2013 OpenRank \u2013 drives the objective indicators from two well-known publicly verifiable data repositories: the ArnetMiner and DBpedia.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Findings<\/jats:title><jats:p>The resultant academic ranking reflects common tendencies of the international academic rankings published by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy (SRC), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE). Evaluation of the proposed methodology advocates its effectiveness and quick reproducibility with low cost of data collection.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Research limitations\/implications<\/jats:title><jats:p>Implementation of the OpenRank methodology faced the issue of availability of the quality data. In future, accuracy of the academic rankings can be improved further by employing more relevant public data sources like the Microsoft Academic Graph, millions of graduate's profiles available in the LinkedIn repositories and the bibliographic data maintained by Association for Computing Machinery and Scopus and so forth.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Practical implications<\/jats:title><jats:p>The suggested use of open data sources would offer new dimensions to evaluate academic performance of the higher education institutions (HEIs) and having comprehensive understanding of the catalyst factors in the higher education.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Social implications<\/jats:title><jats:p>The research work highlighted the need of a purposely built, publicly verifiable electronic data source for performance evaluation of the global HEIs. Availability of such a global database would help in better academic planning, monitoring and analysis. Definitely, more transparent, reliable and less controversial academic rankings can be generated by employing the aspired data source.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type=\"abstract-subheading\">Originality\/value<\/jats:title><jats:p>We suggested a satisfying solution for improvement of the HEIs' ranking process by making the following contributions: (1) enhancing creditability of the ranking results by merely employing the objective performance indicators extracted from the publicly verifiable data sources, (2) developing an academic ranking methodology based on the objective indicators using two well-known data repositories, the DBpedia and ArnetMiner and (3) demonstrating effectiveness of the proposed ranking methodology on the real data sources.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec>","DOI":"10.1108\/lht-07-2019-0131","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2020,12,31]],"date-time":"2020-12-31T07:28:57Z","timestamp":1609399737000},"page":"474-500","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":5,"title":["OpenRank \u2013 a novel approach to rank universities using objective and publicly verifiable data sources"],"prefix":"10.1108","volume":"41","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0120-2344","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Muhammad Sajid","family":"Qureshi","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Ali","family":"Daud","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Malik Khizar","family":"Hayat","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Muhammad Tanvir","family":"Afzal","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"140","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,1,1]]},"reference":[{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref001","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"243","DOI":"10.1007\/s11192-010-0190-z","article-title":"Comparing university rankings","volume":"85","year":"2010","journal-title":"Journal of Scientometrics"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref002","unstructured":"ArnetMiner (2017), \u201cCitation network dataset\u201d, available at: https:\/\/www.aminer.cn\/citation (accessed December 2017)."},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref003","unstructured":"ArnetMiner (2019a), \u201cOpen academic graph\u201d, available at: https:\/\/www.aminer.cn\/open-academic-graph (accessed 14 November 2019)."},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref004","unstructured":"ArnetMiner (2019b), \u201cOpen data and codes by Arnetminer\u201d, available at: https:\/\/www.aminer.cn\/download (accessed 12 November 2019)."},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref005","unstructured":"ArnetMiner (2019c), \u201cOrganization ranking\u201d, available at: https:\/\/www.aminer.org\/ranks\/org (accessed 15 September 2019)."},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref006","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"74","DOI":"10.1016\/j.sbspro.2011.03.006","article-title":"University rankings: diversity, excellence and the European initiative","volume":"13","year":"2011","journal-title":"Science Direct Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref007","article-title":"A century of science: globalization of scientific collaborations, citations, and innovations","year":"2017"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref008","article-title":"Comparing top-k lists","year":"2003"},{"issue":"2","key":"key2023053016404629900_ref009","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"219","DOI":"10.1080\/03797720802254023","article-title":"Rankings and quality assurance in higher education","volume":"33","author":"Federkeil","year":"2011","journal-title":"Higher Education in Europe"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref010","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"185","DOI":"10.1016\/j.joi.2018.12.001","article-title":"Measuring the academic reputation through citation networks","volume":"13","year":"2019","journal-title":"Journal of Informetrics"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref011","article-title":"An insight into the importance of national university rankings in an international context","year":"2013"},{"issue":"2","key":"key2023053016404629900_ref012","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"596","DOI":"10.1016\/j.joi.2016.04.013","article-title":"The ratio of top scientists to the academic staff as an indicator of the competitive strength of universities","volume":"10","year":"2016","journal-title":"Journal of Informetrics"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref013","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"389","DOI":"10.1016\/j.joi.2017.02.004","article-title":"Uncovering fine-grained research excellence: the global research benchmarking system","volume":"11","year":"2017","journal-title":"Journal of Informetrics"},{"issue":"3","key":"key2023053016404629900_ref014","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.4018\/jswis.2009081901","article-title":"Linked data - the story so far","volume":"5","year":"2009","journal-title":"International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref015","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","article-title":"Investigating the relevance of linked open data set with SPARQL queries","year":"2013","DOI":"10.1109\/COMPSACW.2013.31"},{"issue":"9","key":"key2023053016404629900_ref016","first-page":"1","article-title":"A comparison of three major academic rankings for world universities: from a research evaluation perspective","volume":"1","year":"2011","journal-title":"Journal of Library and Information Studies"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref017","volume-title":"Ranking Web or Webometrics - Academic Ranking Methodology","year":"2014"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref018","volume-title":"The Challenge of Establishing World-Class Universities","year":"2009"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref019","article-title":"Ranking universities based on career outcomes of graduates","year":"2016"},{"issue":"3","key":"key2023053016404629900_ref020","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"859","DOI":"10.1016\/j.joi.2017.06.006","article-title":"What drives university research performance? An analysis using CWTS Leiden ranking data","volume":"11","year":"2017","journal-title":"Journal of Informetrics"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref021","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"611","DOI":"10.1016\/j.joi.2013.03.007","article-title":"The influences of counting methods on university rankings based on paper count and citation count","volume":"7","year":"2013","journal-title":"Journal of Informetrics"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref022","volume-title":"ARWU-academic Ranking Methodology","year":"2014"},{"issue":"3","key":"key2023053016404629900_ref023","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"173","DOI":"10.1108\/IDD-05-2018-0014","article-title":"Mining the web to approximate university rankings","volume":"46","year":"2018","journal-title":"Information Discovery and Delivery"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref024","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"495","DOI":"10.1016\/j.socec.2012.04.011","article-title":"On some flaws of university rankings: the example of the scimago report","volume":"41","year":"2012","journal-title":"The Journal of Socio-Economics"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref025","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"276","DOI":"10.1016\/j.knosys.2016.07.012","article-title":"Ranking universities using linked open data","year":"2013"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref026","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"276","DOI":"10.1016\/j.knosys.2016.07.01","article-title":"A semantic similarity measure for linked data: an information content-based approach","volume":"109","year":"2016","journal-title":"Knowledge-Based Systems"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref027","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"156","DOI":"10.1016\/j.ijedudev.2014.10.004","article-title":"International rankings: universities vs higher education systems","volume":"40","year":"2015","journal-title":"International Journal of Educational Development"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref028","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1627","DOI":"10.1007\/s11192-017-2532-6","article-title":"Using Google Scholar institutional level data to evaluate the quality of university research","volume":"113","year":"2017","journal-title":"Scientometrics"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref029","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"153","DOI":"10.1016\/j.techfore.2016.03.029","article-title":"Is measuring the knowledge creation of universities possible? A review of university rankings","volume":"123","year":"2016","journal-title":"Technological Forecasting and Social Change"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref030","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"728","DOI":"10.1016\/j.joi.2014.07.001","article-title":"Influence of co-authorship networks in the research impact ego network analyses from Microsoft academic search","volume":"8","year":"2014","journal-title":"Journal of Informetrics"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref031","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"755","DOI":"10.1016\/j.eswa.2010.07.029","article-title":"Clustering and ranking university majors using data mining and AHP algorithms: a case study in Iran","volume":"38","year":"2011","journal-title":"Expert Systems with Applications"},{"issue":"3","key":"key2023053016404629900_ref032","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"154","DOI":"10.1108\/GKMC-11-2017-0087","article-title":"Impact of scholarly output on university ranking","volume":"67","year":"2018","journal-title":"Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref033","volume-title":"An Overview of Microsoft Academic Service (MAS) and Applications","year":"2015"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref034","volume-title":"Celebrating 80 Years - A Timeline of Events in the Life of","year":"2013"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref035","article-title":"ArnetMiner: extraction and mining of academic social networks","year":"2008"},{"issue":"4","key":"key2023053016404629900_ref036","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"20","DOI":"10.1145\/1852102.1852106","article-title":"A similarity measure for indefinite rankings","volume":"28","year":"2010","journal-title":"ACM Transactions on Information Systems"},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref037","unstructured":"Writer, Q.S. (2015), \u201cQS world university rankings methodology\u201d, p. 11, available at: http:\/\/www.topuniversities.com\/university-rankings-articles\/world-university-rankings\/qs-world-university-rankings-methodology?page=1 (accessed 25 March 2016)."},{"key":"key2023053016404629900_ref038","unstructured":"Writer, T.O. (2016), \u201cThe ranking methodology 2016\u201d, available at: https:\/\/www.timeshighereducation.com\/news\/ranking-methodology-2016 (accessed 10 August 2016)."}],"container-title":["Library Hi Tech"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.emerald.com\/insight\/content\/doi\/10.1108\/LHT-07-2019-0131\/full\/xml","content-type":"application\/xml","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/www.emerald.com\/insight\/content\/doi\/10.1108\/LHT-07-2019-0131\/full\/html","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,7,24]],"date-time":"2025-07-24T22:14:49Z","timestamp":1753395289000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"http:\/\/www.emerald.com\/lht\/article\/41\/2\/474-500\/454461"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2021,1,1]]},"references-count":38,"journal-issue":{"issue":"2","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,1,1]]},"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2023,6,1]]}},"alternative-id":["10.1108\/LHT-07-2019-0131"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1108\/lht-07-2019-0131","relation":{},"ISSN":["0737-8831"],"issn-type":[{"value":"0737-8831","type":"print"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2021,1,1]]}}}