Technical Report 02/2014 Japanese universities and the 2013 edition of the Shanghai ranking Domingo Docampo · Lawrence Cram January 21, 2014. Abstract The emergence of international academic rankings is one of the most inter- esting phenomena in the field of comparative analysis of higher education. The growing influence of the Shanghai ranking led its many critics to show strong reluctance in using it as a source of analysis and improvement, mainly because it was generally thought that its results were not reproducible. Once we have found a way to accurately repli- cate the results of the ranking, we are in a position to shed light into the performance of whole Higher Education systems. This technical report presents the results of some 140 Japanese universities in the 2013 edition of the Shanghai ranking. Keywords Academic rankings · Shanghai · arwu · world class universities · Japanese universities · Japan · Japanese Higher Education System 1 Introduction The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) a.k.a the Shanghai Ranking, evaluates the research performance of academic institutions on the basis of numerical measures related to individual outstanding achievements and institutional research throughput. The accessibility of the sources of the raw data and the fact that the hierarchy of universities generated by ARWU roughly aligns with perceptions of the historical and recent performance of elite research universities have contributed to its acceptance and success (Docampo and Cram, 2014). A first hand account of the Shanghai ranking indicators can be found in Liu and Cheng (2005), and is summarized in Section 2 following Docampo (2011). A reliable account of the ranking procedures can be found in Docampo and Cram (2014). For the sake of clarity, a summary of the procedure is also reproduced in section 3. This report analyzes the performance of Japanese Higher Education institutions on the indicators measured by the Shanghai ranking (2013 edition). To obtain the data for Japanese universities we have checked the electronic sources shown in Section 4. The list of affiliation names and organizations-enhanced corresponding clues are shown Domingo Docampo Universidad de Vigo, Atlantic Research Center for Information and Communication Technolo- gies; Campus Universitario, 36310 Vigo, Spain. Tel.: +34-986-812134 E-mail: ddocampo@uvigo.es Lawrence Cram Australian National University, University House; 1 Balmain Crescent, Acton ACT 0200, Aus- tralia. Tel.: +61-2-6125-5334 E-mail: Lawrence.Cram@anu.edu.au