The Problem of Determining Weighting Factors for Building the Ranking of Ukraine’s Higher Educational Institutions in Terms of Scientific Activity

The article is dedicated to the problem of rating Ukraine’s higher educational institutions in terms of scientific activity and the study of the influence of weighting factors on the position of a university in the ranking. The initial information space used in this work makes it possible to determine the potential of scientific activity in terms of staffing and resources provision as well as its effectiveness in terms of quality of the training of scientific staff (students, graduate students, young scientists, etc.), financial results of scientific and publication activities. As the objects of the research 98 universities of Ukraine are selected. On the basis of the maximum entropy method, the weighting factors that determine the significance of each initial indicator of the information space are calculated. Using the taxonomic method, integral estimates in terms of potential, effectiveness and scientific activity for each institution in whole are calculated with and without the use of the weighting factors. The analysis of the received scores of the universities is carried out, changes in the positions under influence of the weighting factors are investigated. It is concluded that the use of the weighting factors in calculating the integral estimate of the scientific activity of Ukrainian universities did not lead to shifts among the first (the strongest) and the last (the weakest) universities. But changes in the positions in the ranking, sometimes quite significant, took place in most of the universities occupying the middle positions. Thus, due to the weighting factors, the influence of outlying cases on individual indicators is leveled, which allows obtaining more stable, fair and informative results of rating the scientific activity of universities