Page 125 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

124 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.12, 2020

count, but in its actual contribution to expanding human knowledge and serving the society as
well. Although the university ranking methodology could deal with some important relations
when weighing indicators, such as teaching and research, input and output, the exercise does not
represent an assessment of a university’s real academic contributions.
Now we focus on the qualitative contributions of some selected universities. Since the
ETH and Cal Tech ranked closely in QS, and Nanjing University (NJU) and University
of Cambridge ranked almost the same in Nature index, a comparison of their important
contributions to human knowledge and the world development is warranted, as shown in
Figure 3, where we selected representative contributions recorded in universities’ websites and
social history.

Figure 3. A reflection of important contributions from selected universities
Data sources:
1) https://ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich/portrait/nobel-prize-laureates.html.
2) https://www.CalTech.edu/about/legacy/historic-awards-honors/nobel-laureates.
3) https://www.cam.ac.uk/about-the-university/history/timeline.

Obviously, Cambridge has come up with much more crucial discoveries to human knowledge
during its history than NJU, though currently Nature Index ranks NJU and Cambridge the same.
Particularly, the most important contributions from Cambridge, Cal Tech and ETH were awarded
Nobel Prizes in sciences or improved our cognition in the social sciences and humanities, pushing
forward the human knowledge progress.
Certainly, the real contributions also implied the functions of their libraries. When a university
realizes a new contribution, its library also reach a new milestone for supporting the contribution.
The positions of both universities and their libraries are not determined by rankings but by their