MOVING TO FRONT--MORE REPLIES WELCOME
CHE reported on this outfit a number of years ago. Created by some Stony Brook professors, it purports to evaluate schools on "scholarly productivity." Some of its metrics are without any qualitative dimension to them at all: per capita productivity of books and articles, for example (the more shit you shovel, the better you do). Other criteria, such as per capita citations and "awards" per faculty member, introduce some qualitative dimensions to the exercise. But their results are mostly bizarre; here, for example, are the "top ten" in philosophy according to Academic Analytics a few years ago:
1. Michigan State University
2. CUNY Graduate School
2. Princeton University
4. University of Virginia
5. Rutgers
6. University of California – San Diego
7. Pennsylvania State University
8. The University of Texas at Austin
9. SUNY at Stony Brook
10. Rice University
As a list of the "top ten" departments in philosophy, this comes close to qualifying as "random."
A philosopher elsewhere, whose university is thinking of paying the rather substantial fees (tens of thousands of dollars) for this "service," wants to know what others knows about Academic Analytics: "how it gathers material, analyses it, and presents it. How does it compare with the most recent NRC rankings? What kind of staff does it employ? What universities have used it and what was their verdict about how reliable/useful it was?"
Readers?
