Global university reputation and rankings: insights from culturomics

In this study, we used culturomics (i.e. analysis of large electronic datasets for the study of human culture) in order to study the use of the names of various universities in the digi- tized corpus of English books. In particular, we used the Google Ngram viewer (available online: http://books.google.com/ngrams) to produce the frequencies of the names of 13 US, 5 UK and 4 Canadian universities in the English books and examined how these frequencies changed with time (1800 to 2008). We further used these frequencies to establish reputation rankings for these universities. Our results showed that Ngram is an easy-and-cheap-to-apply tool to approximate the reputation and 'intellectual' impact of universities over long time periods. Its reputation- generating capability, at least for top universities, is not worse than the within- and between- system capabilities of commercial tools (i.e. QS, THE and THE World Reputation Rankings). Ngram can, thus, be promising at least for students (and their families), who make choices that are affected by rankings, providing them with additional benefits (e.g. perception of the historical impact of a university) when compared to the short-term, volatile annual commercial rankings.