On the Correlation Between Research Complexity and Academic Competitiveness

Academic capacity is a common way to reflect the educational level of a country or district. The aim of this study is to explore the difference between the scientific research level of institutions and countries. By proposing an indicator named Citation-weighted Research Complexity Index (CRCI), we profile the academic capacity of universities and countries with respect to research complexity. The relationships between CRCI of universities and other relevant academic evaluation indicators are examined. To explore the correlation between academic capacity and economic level, the relationship between research complexity and GDP per capita is analysed. With experiments on the Microsoft Academic Graph data set, we investigate publications across 183 countries and universities from the Academic Ranking of World Universities in 19 research fields. Experimental results reveal that universities with higher research complexity have higher fitness. In addition, for developed countries, the development of economics has a positive correlation with scientific research. Furthermore, we visualize the current level of scientific research across all disciplines from a global perspective.