4. Conclusion

RCCSE has adopted ESI and DII as the data sources for fourth time to focus research efforts on a more competitive and in-depth study. All the 1565 universities (whose total cited times for papers in the ESI within top 1% in the past 11 years) and 960 research institutions (which are in the ESI discipline ranking list) are selected as evaluation subjects. The results show that Chinese universities have achieved rapid progress in the past two years and made gratifying achievements. But when compared with other world-class universities, the gap is still vast. There is a long way to go for building world-class universities for China. Especially, there is a major gap in cutting edge research results.

Comprehensive universities perform better. The top universities in the world have good performance on all or most of the 22 disciplines with great influence. Take Massachusetts Institute of Technology for example, it is generally believed that it is single-disciplinary oriented and technology-based. But from the original data and evaluation results, it has a comprehensive range of discipline system. World-class universities should have the characteristics of obvious comprehensiveness, cutting-edge innovation. The merger of China’s universities is justified and reasonable, which will help to build world-class universities. They should be of research-type with high level and high-impact.

However, there are also some limitations of the evaluation on world-class universities and research institutions. A major deficiency is that more emphasize are imposed on the sciences, but less on the humanities. The current evaluation system always favors sciences universities. Especially those universities with strong strength on Chemistry, Electrical & Electronics and Engineering may perform better on the indicator: Patent. Those universities or research institutions oriented on humanities or with superior advantage on humanities may have worse performance on the evaluation indicators. In addition, the design of evaluation indicators and their relative weights also need to be improved. Further verification of accuracy, reliability of data is also needed, etc.

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