I've been in this list for some time, and there's an issue that has not got a lot of attention - and I guess why. While we hve been debating a lot of privatization, corporatization (and so forth) of academia and, especially, the publishing system, I don't remember a lot of talks about the "rankings".

THE has just released the European 2016 best universities ranking.

Guess what, 4 out of 5 best universities are in the UK, and 6 out of 10 best.

Shall we talk about the inconsitencies of such "rankings"? To make an example, my university (University of Lisbon) is not listed, while there's one of its schools (Instituto Superior Tecnico)!

Roars, an Italian based group of researchers, has been making a huge work in showing how unscientific are this and other rankings (here, for example).

To me, it is not surprising that UK-based organizations make rankings that would favor the UK. I am astonished by the fact that "we", the international academic community, accept such rankings as "international", just because... they are in English!

Well, I'd love to hear some comments from UK-based academics...

:)

Best wishes, and... congrats to people in the top ten!

Simone

--