Universities, research organizations and rankings

In the past decade university rankings have become important tools for policymaking and are increasingly used for marketing purposes. For that reason alone good care of data and statistics underlying these rankings is crucial. Therefore it is essential to obtain more transparency regarding both the definition of the universities and the data collection procedures that are applied in the various rankings. This one-day-course will focus on definitions and data collection procedures for the universities that appear in the Leiden Ranking. We will discuss the challenge of identifying universities from author affiliations in scientific publications comparing alternative approaches that are offered in different bibliographic databases. Apart from universities we will also look at the contribution from non-university research organizations and the particular challenge to identify them. This includes research organizations and (academic) hospitals