Details of Research Outputs

University rankings released annually arise considerable attentions of the public, the media, and university stakeholders. Paradoxically, more attentions trigger more critiques from the experts and even university stakeholders. The commonly used ranking method, the weighted sum, has a flaw in unfairly overvaluing the best alternatives and undervaluing a large part of unique universities globally. In this paper, we contribute methodologically in multicriteria ranking approach when universities and their evaluations are ready. Through incorporating subjective preferences and objective values, our proposed two-stage skyline superiority and inferiority ranking (SIR) approach relies on relative (rather than absolute) differences of evaluation values. This approach uncovers unique values of those distinctive universities that should have been judged more fairly. We deliberate a comparable analysis based on the prevailing The Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) University Rankings of 2020. Our empirical studies uncover problematic issues in criteria systems of these prevailing university rankings, which are worth pondering on. © 2021 IEEE.