Abstract:
This study aimed to explain the relevance of international ranking systems in assessing the
research performance of universities. Research publication details of University of Jaffna
were retrieved from the annual reports, Scopus database and Web of Science database from
the year 2020 to 2022. Furthermore, the research delves into popular international ranking
systems and their indicators and weightage, that impact the research ranking of an academic
institution. The University of Jaffna published more journal articles (252) and conference
articles (601) in 2021 than in other years considered for this study. According to the annual
report, University of Jaffna published 29.31% of journal articles during the three years among
the total publications. In 2020, 43.38% of the journal articles were published in Scopus
followed by 40.47% in 2021 and 48.77% in 2022. Since, THE world university ranking, QS
ranking and SCImago ranking rely on Scopus database, these ranking systems considered
only 43.38%, 40.47% and 48.77% of research publications during 2020, 2021 and 2022
respectively to measure the University of Jaffna research-related indicators. URAP ranking
considered 28.57%, 27.38% and 29.09% of the total University of Jaffna publications for the
ranking. Webometric considered the Google profile details of the research publications,
which include only the institutional email ID profile research publications. Nearly 59.13% of
the staff have their Google profiles under institutional profile, which contribute to
webometric ranking. This study revealed that less than 50% of the research output was
considered by the popular international ranking systems to measure the research-related
indicators of University of Jaffna. It is because of data sources used by the ranking systems.
Further, this study explained that, the popular ranking systems failed to use holistic approach
to measure the research performance of the University of Jaffna and discussed the
shortcoming in methodology follow and transparency. Ranking numbers of higher education
institutes may have impact on policy making and the policy makers should consider the
shortcoming when these were used as information source. Also, it recommended that, a
national level ranking can be developed to measure the performance of higher education
institutes by considering specific needs and objectives of the higher education institutes rather
than relying solely on the international ranking systems.
