Relationship between the Performances of Top World Universities based on Scientometric Indicators and their Position in Ten International Academic Ranking Systems

The current research aims to investigate the relationship between performances of top world universities according to scientometric indicators and their position in ten international academic ranking systems.
This quantitative correlational research was conducted using scientometric indicators. The population of the study consisted of ten international academic ranking systems and the top 100 universities in each ranking system were selected using purposive sampling method. Elsevier’s SciVal was utilized for data gathering. Moreover, the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (version 18) was used for correlational analysis.
Findings: Results of the study revealed negative but statistically significant associations between six scientometric indicators of the universities, namely total publications, total citations, citations per publication, field-weighted citation impact, highly cited publications and outputs in top journals, and the universities’ position in all ten ranking systems. On contrary, statistically significant relationship between international research collaboration of the universities and their position in ranking systems was only found in the U.S. News & World Report's Best Global Universities Ranking.
Results of the study showed that research performance of the world universities has a great impact on their status in international academic ranking systems.