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Wageningen out of Times top 50 again

Wageningen University & Research has fallen from position 47 to position 65 in the Times Higher Education rankings. The institution suddenly scores a lot lower on research quality. It may be that the way the publication and reputation scores are calculated has been changed again.
Albert Sikkema

Last year WUR shot up the rankings from 75th to 47th place – partly because of changes to the rules. This position made WUR the best Dutch university. This year both Delft and Amsterdam (UvA) are higher, at position 59 and 63 respectively.

To understand the lower evaluation, we need to look at how the scores are built up. Last year Wageningen scored 52.6 points for its education, this year 51.8 – a small drop. The citation score rose from 87.8 to 92.8, and for international outlook the university went up from 70.3 to 75.6 points, while its score for industry income remained stable at 100 points. The big drop on the score table was for research. While last year’s score was 66.9, this year’s is only 50.1. Such a big drop can only be explained by a change in the rules, or a failure to include all of Wageningen’s research achievements. The latter is not the case, says information specialist Ellen Fest of the WUR library. It is possible that this year the Times divided the number of Wageningen publications by the combined staff of the university and research institutes, whereas last year the publications were divided by the number of university researchers only. This change produces a lower score.

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