A scientist at Information Technology University (ITU), Dr. Saeed-ul-Hassan has developed a Quality Research Ranking (QQR) System for 30 Muslim majority countries. The ranking system compares roughly 450 educational institutes of higher learning in the Muslim Countries.
While speaking about its significance, Professor at the Scientometrics Lab of ITU, Dr. Saeed-ul-Hassan stated:
“Most university rankings give a broad perspective on institutes but don’t assess research potential in specific subjects and themes. We have designed the ITU-QRR system such that it covers both larger academic disciplines and specific subject areas within these disciplines”
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In addition, he added that a user can specifically search leading institutes for disciplines such as Agriculture, Computer Science or Social Science. Moreover, they can also narrow down their search to particular areas of research; for instance, Artificial Intelligence or Data Mining.
About Quality Research Ranking System
The QRR system of ITU compares around 450 institutes from nearly 30 Muslim countries which qualify to top universities from all across the world. The benchmark scores are assigned to the universities out of 100 – same score which is set for Harvard University in the US. In addition, the system of QRR benchmarks research presentation of these higher universities across 250+ subjects.
Furthermore, the Quality Research Ranking system also covers publications that are listed in Scopus Database. Additionally, it also covers conferences and journals of the Computing Research and Education (CORE) Association of Australasia. The system chooses only those publications which are available only in English language. It also selects journals with proper attributions and which have not been withdrawn ever.
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The latest i.e. 2017 version of Quality Research Ranking system of ITU has 3 chief components:
- Analytics
- Rankings
- University profiles
Analytics Section
In the analytics section, a user can check rankings which are based on individual subject areas planned into 16 broad-level and 250+ detailed-level categories. Primarily, this section is targeted at institutes with data which is valuable for strategic decision making. To assist users in identifying strengths and weaknesses, the university profile feature also offers broad understanding into research landscape of individual universities.
Rankings Section
To measure the quality of research work formed by institutes, a user can utilize the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) of journals. The SNIP regularizes citation possibility across the fields. Moreover, it also specifies the number of times a journal has been cited in other journals or in the same field.
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Following is the category of the SNIP journals:
- Publications featured in top 5 are considered as Highest Quality
- Journals featured in top 10 are classified as High Quality
- Publications featured in top 50 are categorized as Medium Quality
It is relevant to state that the end users of Quality Research Ranking system are not only students. The scientist and the developers firmly hope that the system will also be beneficial for national and international funding agencies, policy makers and the scientific community as well.
You can access the QRR system by clicking here.
Source: Technology Review
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