A big part of the work I try to do on this blog is to bring the excellent work of universities from around the world to a wider audience.  So, a recent study that set out to find the most influential university peaked my interest.

Whilst there have been a number of league tables generated in recent years to attempt to answer that question, there’s a sense that each comes with its own unique flaws.

So a French project that attempts to do so via the number of mentions a university receives in Wikipedia is certainly one of interest.

Wikipedia influence

The project aims to overcome some of the challenges inherent in ranking universities from around the world, such as the general Anglicization of publication, and the focus on research vs teaching.

It uses the Pagerank algorithm made famous by Google to create a map of links between nodes to determine their importance.  So, in this context, it looks for mentions of a university throughout Wikipedia, and uses this to determine its influence.

The process was applied to 24 different language versions of the site, which collectively cover 59% of the worlds population and 68% of the total number of articles.

The team remind us that the rankings for each language do tend to favor universities from those countries, so the French list features 32 French universities, whilst the German list features 63 German universities.

These national lists are then pooled together to form the global ranking, with the top 20 in this list as follows:

1. University of Cambridge U.K.
2. University of Oxford U.K.
3. Harvard University U.S.
4. Columbia University U.S.
5. Princeton University U.S.
6. Massachusetts Institute of Technology U.S.
7. University of Chicago U.S.
8. Stanford University U.S.
9. Yale University U.S.
10 University of California, Berkeley U.S.
11. Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
12. Cornell University U.S.
13. University of Pennsylvania U.S.
14. University of London U.K.
15. Uppsala University Sweden
16. University of Edinburgh U.K.
17. Heidelberg University Germany
18. University of California, Los Angeles U.S.
19. New York University U.S.
20. University of Michigan U.S.

You can read the full list on the teams website.

So how useful is the ranking?  Well, it does appear to favor older, more established universities that have a long track record of cultural impact.  A good case in point is Humboldt University of Berlin.

It ranks 11th on the Wikipedia list, due in no small part to having educated 29 Nobel Prize winners down the years, yet it seldom appears in more contemporary league tables at all.

The Wikipedia list also seems to provide much greater levels of diversity to traditional lists, with representation for institutions from countries such as Egypt and the Czech Republic.

Indeed, the list is noticeable for the high number of German institutions, with the nation ranking 2nd behind the US, but ahead of the UK.  Most general lists have a heavy weighting towards English language institutions.

So whilst the listing is not perfect, it does provide an interesting counterpoint to traditional rankings, and whilst those rankings are unlikely to be displaced by this new method, it does add a fresh approach to the construction of the rankings.