NLRIS: Modeling and Analysis of Non-local Influence of Research Output of Institutions

In this paper, we posit a novel metric for ranking academic institutions based on the extent of influence their publications have on the global research community. We quantify the university’s global research impact using a calculated internationality score we call ’Non-local Research Influence Score’ (NLRIS). We propose the evaluation metric which is fair to the institutions which are smaller in size and do not qualify to be considered for the reputed ranking schemes but are performing well in terms of research quality and attracting citations and collaborators around the world. Our work calculates the scores of 75 universities using the Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) function. This score is calculated as a function of the global influence in terms of citations (Nonlocal Influence Quotient – NLIQ) and the extent of international research collaboration International Collaboration Ratio – ICR). The CES function accepts 2 variables, K and L as input and produces the variable Q as an output. In our model, we substitute K and L with the calculated values of ICR and NLIQ. The output of the CES function provides us with the desired internationality score of each institution. PSO is used to model the constrained optimization problem. In this paper, we also define a metric for representing NLIQ and ICR of individual universities. We have also performed a comparison between QS ranking and our calculated internationality scores.

Keywords: Concavity, Constant Elasticity of Substitution, Influence, International collaboration ratio, Internationality, Non-local influence quotient.