A Note on the Ranking of Saudi Arabian Universities based on highlycited.com

Recently, Thomson Reuters has published its 2014 list of highly cited researchers (HCRs)[1]. Initial studies over the list [2] suggested that some universities (for instance, King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia) may have been manipulating its world ranking by contracting with highly cited researchers. In this work, we analyse the ranking of other Saudi universities based solely on the list. Our analysis suggests that other universities in Saudi Arabia do not follow the steps of King Abdulaziz University when it comes to contracting with HCRs. 1 Preprocessing the data Before analysing the 2014 HCRs list, we need to preprocess the data for the following main reasons: • Inconsistency on institutes names. • Handling duplicates on the list. For inconsistent naming, we make sure that the affiliation name is the same across the list. For instance, King Abduluziz University is the same as King Abdulaziz University or Urbana Champaign and Urbana-Champaign. There are other minor inconsistencies including missing the country of some institutes while mention it in other entries. For duplicate authors, there are two researchers with different primary affiliations across the list and one author with different secondary affiliation. In this work, we do not try to combine different institutions into a single one. Instead, we count them as if they were different even though, in reality, they may belong to the same institution. Thus, we do not combine all universities belong to the University of California system into one institute. ∗E-Mail: [email protected]