Nowadays university rankings are ubiquitous commodities; a plethora of them is published every year by private enterprises, state authorities and universities. University rankings are very popular to governments, journalists, university administrations and families as well. At the same time, they are heavily criticized as being very subjective and contradictory to each other. University rankings have been studied with respect to political, educational and data management aspects. In this paper, we focus on a specific research question regarding the alignment of some well-known such rankings, ultimately targeting to investigate the usefulness of the variety of all these rankings. First, we describe in detail the methodology to collect and homogenize the data and, second, we statistically analyze these data to examine the correlation among the different rankings. The results show that despite their statistically significant correlation, there are many cases of high divergence and instability, which can be reduced by ordered categorization. Our conclusion is that if, in principle, someone accepts the reliability of university rankings, the necessity and the usefulness, of all of them is questionable since only few of them could be sufficient representatives of the whole set. The overabundance of university rankings is especially conspicuous for the top universities.

中文翻译：

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论多个大学排名的必要性

如今大学排名是无处不在的商品；私营企业、国家当局和大学每年都会出版大量的出版物。大学排名也很受政府、记者、大学管理人员和家庭的欢迎。同时，他们被严厉批评为非常主观且相互矛盾。大学排名已经在政治、教育和数据管理方面进行了研究。在本文中，我们专注于有关一些知名此类排名对齐的特定研究问题，最终旨在调查所有这些排名的多样性的有用性。首先，我们详细描述了收集和统一数据的方法，其次，我们对这些数据进行统计分析，以检查不同排名之间的相关性。结果表明，尽管它们在统计上具有显着的相关性，但存在许多高度发散和不稳定的情况，可以通过有序分类来减少这种情况。我们的结论是，如果原则上有人接受大学排名的可靠性，那么所有排名的必要性和实用性都是值得怀疑的，因为只有少数排名足以代表整个排名。对于顶尖大学来说，大学排名的过多尤其引人注目。有人接受大学排名的可靠性、必要性和有用性，所有这些都是值得怀疑的，因为只有少数几个可以充分代表整个集合。对于顶尖大学来说，大学排名的过多尤其引人注目。有人接受大学排名的可靠性、必要性和有用性，所有这些都是值得怀疑的，因为只有少数几个可以充分代表整个集合。对于顶尖大学来说，大学排名的过多尤其引人注目。