Fitness and Research Complexity Among Research-Active Universities in the World

In addition to knowledge transfer through higher education, universities play an important role in exploring new concepts and innovation by research. While most research-active universities cover a wide range of academic disciplines, strategic research prioritisation becomes an important task of senior management and research leaders. This paper investigates research-active institutes in the world according to the Academic Ranking of World Universities. Revealed symmetric comparative advantage analysis is applied on the research publications extracted from the Microsoft Academic Graph data set, and the correlations between research institutes and research fields are analysed. This paper also investigates the fitness of research institutes and analyses the nicheness of research disciplines. The relationship between opportunity value, research complexity index and the fitness level are explored.