One of the exclusions that I find interesting is any faculty that has a joint position at a company. A lot of great professors get 0 credit because of this.
Another one is that you are penalized for having student authors on your papers.
According to csrankings.org's FAQ, they only include professors who can advise a CS-only student. The conflict is that the website includes areas (like "Embedded & real-time systems", "Robotics", and "Computer Architecture") that are traditionally done in EE and ECE departments. One significant example is UT Austin's prolific ECE department.
The fundamental conceit of csrankings.org is right in the name. US News (and anyone else) does just as good a job. And always will. You can matter have your measurement gamed. Or you can measure in obscurity. Or you can matter and not measure. Pick one.
For undergraduate, just go wherever is cheapest with a reasonable curriculum and non-joke professors (decently difficult to hack: couple hundred citations and also real industry experience). Emphasize places that will also teach you non-CS skills (a second major, a great network that in addition implicitly teaches you the right type of communication skills, etc.).
For a masters, just don't.
For a phd, go with the best advisor you can find and finish fast.
Ignore rankings. They exist to be hacked. And academics are great hackers.
I'm sure Emery who runs csrankings.org has thought of this and that criteria "professors who can advise a CS-only student" is well thought out. Anyone who comes up with rankings/datasets has to determine a set of inclusion/exclusion criteria, which will be unsatisfying to some people. CS research can certainly be done in many different departments including iSchools, math, media studies, operation/management science, but this is a ranking of CS institutions rather than CS research, even if we think the latter is more useful.
Your reference to "traditionally done in EE and ECE departments" is to say that your (and perhaps others') view of what computer science traditionally is, should take precedence over the universities' self-definitions. The former (which depends on different peoples' perspectives of what is CS) is harder to to delineate in a universally-agreeable way than the latter (which has essentially no subjectivity). So I'd imagine a website like this which is used as a wide reference, will want to reduce as much of the author's own subjectivity as possible, to actually be acceptable to a wide range of people.
Huh, not sure why Stephen Boyd is not included in the Stanford list, but John Duchi is (if you’re reading this John, I’m only a little sorry! ;). He’s on the top 10 highest citation count of all Stanford professors behind essentially Hastie and Tibshirani (both of Elements of Statistical Learning fame), and both of which I’m also surprised are not included, even though they can all advise CS-only students.
This is a bit silly of course because Stanford has a full cross-department policy, where the student’s department and their PhD advisors can be completely unrelated. (I’m not exaggerating at all when I’m saying this, and this policy also includes the Business and Medicine schools. There are EE professors who have business school students even without a courtesy appointment in the school of business. Similar things happen in the Medical school, etc.)
I wonder how that (for Stanford and other schools) would change the rankings.
[+] [-] azhenley|6 years ago|reply
Another one is that you are penalized for having student authors on your papers.
[+] [-] l31g|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayjava|6 years ago|reply
For undergraduate, just go wherever is cheapest with a reasonable curriculum and non-joke professors (decently difficult to hack: couple hundred citations and also real industry experience). Emphasize places that will also teach you non-CS skills (a second major, a great network that in addition implicitly teaches you the right type of communication skills, etc.).
For a masters, just don't.
For a phd, go with the best advisor you can find and finish fast.
Ignore rankings. They exist to be hacked. And academics are great hackers.
[+] [-] lazyjeff|6 years ago|reply
Your reference to "traditionally done in EE and ECE departments" is to say that your (and perhaps others') view of what computer science traditionally is, should take precedence over the universities' self-definitions. The former (which depends on different peoples' perspectives of what is CS) is harder to to delineate in a universally-agreeable way than the latter (which has essentially no subjectivity). So I'd imagine a website like this which is used as a wide reference, will want to reduce as much of the author's own subjectivity as possible, to actually be acceptable to a wide range of people.
[+] [-] LolWolf|6 years ago|reply
This is a bit silly of course because Stanford has a full cross-department policy, where the student’s department and their PhD advisors can be completely unrelated. (I’m not exaggerating at all when I’m saying this, and this policy also includes the Business and Medicine schools. There are EE professors who have business school students even without a courtesy appointment in the school of business. Similar things happen in the Medical school, etc.)
I wonder how that (for Stanford and other schools) would change the rankings.