Characterization of the scientific production on university ranking. a bibliometric study from 1988 to 2018

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe the evolution of research and publications about university rankings. University rankings allows comparing the quality of the academic activity of higher education institutions. After the publication of the first global ranking in 2004, the Shanghai ranking, various university classifications have been developed and a greater scientific discussion on the subject has been encouraged. For this study, the articles on the subject published on the Web of Science (WoS) were used as a database. Several bibliometric indicators were applied to detect the main journals, organizations and authors that have worked on the subject. From a study of co-words, the main lines of research were determined, highlighting among them the measurement of research productivity.