Impactor factor versus Q1 class of journals in world university rankings

University ranking has become an important subject in recent years, to the extent that it has changed the landscape for tertiary education in many countries, particularly in the Orient. The appointment of a university head may hinge on its results, which are published every year. Students looking for a place to study invariably will refer to the rankings as their guide for choosing a particular university. The latter is probably more evident in the East as recent political events and upheavals, over the last decade or so, and the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in the United States of America, have resulted in many foreign students looking to the East for continuing their university education. It offers a golden opportunity for a number of Asian universities to attract these students to study in their country, as North America and Europe tighten their intake of foreign students, particularly from the Middle East and Asia. Furthermore, the economics of higher education has led to many governments and their students to study in Asian universities where the cost of education is much lower. As a result of these global changes the world university rankings, of which there are several now in place, have become more significant and play an important part in guiding foreign students to the universities of their chosen subject or field. It helps the students to make decisions about joining a particular university for their higher education and training. Although there are several agencies involved in university rankings, we will confine our discussion to the arguably more popular world university rankings conducted by QS Quacquarelli Symonds Limited. One of the six criteria used in the QS ranking is based on the number of citations per faculty member. Ideally the number of citations a journal obtains reflects the quality of its papers, namely higher citations for journals in which new discoveries and findings are reported and published. Thus these journals command high respect in a particular field and therefore are highly cited. Journal Citation Reports or JCR categorizes these journals with the help of an indicator, known as the ‘impact factor’ (IF), which describes the quality and popularity of a journal based on the number of citations it receives and accumulates in a year. It indicates how many times the papers in a particular journal are cited by other journals. It is increasingly being regarded as the key indicator of the quality of science being published in the journals. As a result, the IF of a journal has been taken as an indicator of the quality of scholarship that is being produced and features importantly as a selection criterion in several exercises either for students aiming for a postdoctoral fellowship or a lecturer applying for promotion to a higher position in academic and research institutions. Based on the JCR database, journals are further categorized into four different tiers, namely Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4, which apparently is supposed to indicate their quality or tier in ranking. This is done based on the number of citations and the IF of the journal concerned. It has led to many anomalies and inconsistencies which are discussed and presented below.