A radical shift in the data underlying rankings is about to upend the rankings world – largely in favor of China’s position. For instance, in early 2024, the Leiden University Center for Science and Technology Studies CWTS group issued new university rankings that add open-data sources to the traditional curated list of elite journals that has been the standard. The results show a world turned upside down for university rankings.
Where once the list of universities with the highest scientific impact would have been Oxford, Stanford, Harvard and MIT, the new top 10 list of universities with high scientific impact includes eight universities from China. In the West, only Harvard and the University of Toronto garner top-10 spots.
