objective rankings for CS departments
Submitted
by
John Regehr
John Regehr writes "Students, prospective students, and professors care about how their department is ranked relative to other departments. Current ranking schemes for computer science departments are subjective: they are compiled, for example, by asking department chairs to rank other departments. An alternative, objective way to rank research departments is the meta h index, which we have compiled for a number of computer science departments. The h index, a measure of productivity of an individual researcher, is "the number of papers with citation number higher or equal to h." So to have an h index of 5, one must have written 5 papers that are each cited at least 5 times. The meta h index, then, extends this idea to measure the number of researchers in a department with h index higher than or equal to h. Of course it is easy to find flaws in this way of measuring research departments, but it has the advantages of being simple and of having no parameters to tune. Also, perhaps surprisingly, the meta h index correlates rather well with the ranking produced by US News."