Data from: Global network centrality of university rankings

Universities and higher education institutions form an integral part of the national infrastructure and prestige. As academic research benefits increasingly from international exchange and cooperation, many universities have increased investment in improving and enabling their global connectivity. Yet, the relationship of university performance and its global physical connectedness has not been explored in detail. We conduct the first large-scale data-driven analysis into whether there is a correlation between university relative ranking performance and its global connectivity via the air transport network. The results show that local access to global hubs (as measured by air transport network betweenness) strongly and positively correlates with the ranking growth (statistical significance in different models ranges between 5% and 1% level). We also showed that the local airport's aggregate flight paths (degree) and capacity (weighted degree) has no effect on university ranking, further showing global connectivity distance is more important that the capacity of flight connections. We also examined the effect of local city economic development as a confounding variable and no effect was observed suggesting that access to global transportation hubs outweighs economic performance as a determinant of university ranking. The impact of this research is that we have determined the importance of the centrality of global connectivity and, hence, established initial evidence for further exploring potential connections between university ranking and regional investment policies on improving global connectivity.

高等院校与高等教育机构是国家基础设施与国家声誉的重要组成部分。随着学术研究愈发依赖国际交流与合作，诸多高校已加大投入，以提升并强化自身的全球连通性。然而，高校绩效与其实体全球连通性之间的关联尚未得到深入探究。本研究首次开展大规模数据驱动分析，探究高校相对排名绩效与基于航空运输网络（air transport network）的全球连通性之间是否存在关联。研究结果显示，本地接入全球枢纽的程度（以航空运输网络中介中心性（betweenness）衡量）与排名提升呈显著正相关，不同模型下的统计学显著性水平介于5%至1%之间。本研究同时发现，本地机场的总航线数量（度，degree）与运力（加权度，weighted degree）对高校排名并无影响，进一步表明相较于航线连接的运力，全球连通性距离更为关键。本研究还将本地城市经济发展作为混淆变量（confounding variable）进行检验，未发现其产生显著影响，这表明接入全球交通枢纽相较于经济水平，是影响高校排名的更关键因素。本研究的价值在于明确了全球连通性中心性的重要性，从而为进一步探究高校排名与改善全球连通性的区域投资政策之间的潜在关联奠定了初步证据基础。