Academics strike back at spurious rankings. D Butler, Nature 447, 514-515 (31 May 2007) doi:10.1038/447514b [Thanks to Stevan Harnard via liblicense]
The German Center for Higher Education Development (CHE) also offers rankings à la carte for almost 300 German, Austrian and Swiss universities — users can query its online database by individual discipline, number of publications or student outcomes, for example. With European Union support, the CHE is expanding the system to cover all Europe. Adams says that more complex systems such as these are better than oversimplified summary tables, which policy-makers tend to take at face value.