And announcing it as if I totally believe it:
When a study found that the business school at the University of Missouri at Kansas City boasted the world’s No. 1 program in innovation-management research, officials from the chancellor on down basked publicly in the news.
Now an investigation by The Kansas City Star has cast substantial doubt on that glowing result.
The two authors of the 2011 paper, who were visiting scholars at the school when they did the study, apparently structured it to ensure the top ranking, the newspaper reports. Administrators at the school were aware of the reshaping of the data, the Star adds.
“I just think this paper is fatally flawed,” said Ivan Oransky, of the blog Retraction Watch.
A likely motive for the effort, the newspaper says, was to meet the expectations of Henry W. Bloch, the benefactor for whom the school is named.
The university told the Star that it stands by the study.
via chronicle.com
In my own rankings (nicknamed the "JW Economist Ranking System") would make sure I was counting total papers (not citations and not adjusted for the number of co-authors) in mid-level journals.
Here is a quote from the article:
A professor who feared that speaking out would harm his career said he and his colleagues were skeptical even as the study’s results were announced.
“We all knew that this was bullshit,” he said. “We knew that UMKC was not better than MIT and Stanford.”
Any idiot knows if you are doing contrived rankings to make yourself look better than you actually are you follow these steps:
- Pick a ranking criteria where you are doing your best
- Pick a timeframe during which you peaked
- Perform the rankings and if you end up #1 ...
- Go back to 1 and 2 and broaden the horizon of the study
- Perform the rankings and if you end up in the top 10 with the usual suspects ahead of you ...
- Boast that you are in the top ten! In the world!
Any idiot knows that.
