ETHICS IN SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS Ethics Sci Environ Polit Vol. 13: 59–64, 2014 doi: 10.3354/esep00148 Printed May 2014 Published online May 15, 2014 INTRODUCTION Higher learning institutions are known to have existed for over 4000 yr, with the Shangyang Higher School (established around 2250-2200 BC) and the Imperial Central School (established around 1050 BC), both in China, and other institutions in Pakistan (7th c. BC) and India (5th c. BC) (www.cwrl. utexas.edu/~bump/OriginUniversities.html) among the world’s oldest. The most time-honored ancient university 1 was Plato’s Academy 2 (also known as the Platonic Academy or Academy of Plato), with a his- tory extending from 387 BC to 529 AD, which held classes, gave lectures and builtup a library (Forbes 1833). The word ‘university’ was coined for the Italian University of Bologna, which was founded in 1088 and is considered to be the first university in the sense of a higher-learning, degree-awarding insti- tute. Today, there are about 21 000 universities/ © Inter-Research 2014 · www.int-res.com *Corresponding author: kstergio@bio.auth.gr Global university rankings uncovered: introduction Konstantinos I. Stergiou 1,2, * , Athanassios C. Tsikliras 1 1 Institute of Marine Biological Resources and Inland Waters, Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, Aghios Kosmas, 16777 Athens, Greece 2 Laboratory of Ichthyology, Department of Zoology, School of Biology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, UP Box 134, 541 24 Thessaloniki, Greece ABSTRACT: University rankings have gained growing attention from university administrations and faculty members, markets, governments, mass media and the public at large, affecting nearly all aspects directly or indirectly related to academia. This Theme Section includes 12 essays from 16 authors, coming from 9 countries (i.e. Singapore, the USA, the UK, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Cyprus and Greece). These essays cover different methodological, socio-political, econom- ical and ethical ‘hot issues’ emerging from the dominance of rankings in the higher education sec- tor through the views and thoughts of different stakeholders (i.e. university administrators, people involved in performing the rankings, and scientists). We hope that this Theme Section and the questions it raises will further contribute to the recent debate and future of university rankings, whether they be global or regional, as well as help find the nexus between numbers (i.e. rankings) and knowledge (i.e. higher education institutions); to paraphrase Plato’s quote ‘a good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers’. KEY WORDS: Global university rankings · Higher education · Marketization of higher education · Ethics Resale or republication not permitted without written consent of the publisher 1 The word ‘university’ is derived from the Latin universitas, which comes from the words universitas magistrorum et scholarium = a community of teachers and scholars. 2 The use of the Google Ngram viewer, which shows time series of the relative frequency of a phrase when compared to the frequency of all other phrases composed of the same number of words in the corpus of digitized books, shows that the relative frequency of usage of ‘Plato’s Academy’, in its various forms, increased by one order of magnitude be- tween 1800 and 1940-1960, i.e. from about 0.0000010 to about 0.000011. The latter is higher than, for example, those of the universities of Lancaster, Essex, Warwick and Southampton in the UK and University of Calgary in Can- ada during this same time period (see Figs. S2 and S3 in the Supplement to Stergiou & Tsikliras 2013). A detailed expla- nation and usage of the Google Ngram viewer is provided in Michel et al. (2011) and Lin et al. (2012), and as applied in rankings in Stergiou & Tsikliras (2013). FREE REE ACCESS CCESS Contribution to the Theme Section ‘Global university rankings uncovered’