Healthcare and Science thomsonreuters.com

Even though my first degree was in economics I soon became fascinated with the area of management information systems.

When I began my research there was very little support for this idea in academia and in 1975 I helped developed the first large scale online database retrieval system in Japan.

Later, NACSIS, former of the National Institute of Informatics was formed at University of Tokyo and I worked to pull all the universities in Japan onto a single online library catalog information system.

As a continuation of this we launched a project to count the number of research papers being published by country in 1987. The Japanese government was very excited to see that the number of papers for Japan was growing rapidly.

I used the National Citation Report (NCR) from Thomson Reuters for the first time in 2000 and got to know Henry Small and his team. The report allowed us to rank universities in Japan by discipline using the citation data provided. The universities' initial reaction to this ranking was not positive - they simply did not like to be evaluated in this way. However the government changed its policy and actively began to promote the strongest universities by creating the Top 30 Program or Center of Excellence program in 2002. By 2004 the National Universities were incorporated which naturally enhanced the level of competition between them.

Nowadays this ranking is referenced extensively. For example, the tables are used in a book for school students to select their university and many university managers are now very keen to be featured. This also means researchers are also much more aware that they need to publish papers more often.

My current major project is for the Council of Science and Technology headed by the Prime Minister himself. I produce an annual evaluation of universities and national laboratories and this shows an increasingly widening gap between the top universities and the rest. I think the Japanese government should develop a more scientific method to support research and allocate funding to universities and research institutions based on performance. We need to fund more basic as well as applied research and take a longer term view. We also need to develop a more balanced portfolio of research.

An alarming statistic has shown that only 20% of authors in Japan actually publish in domestic journals. We are now working to improve the quality of Japan's journals and make them more recognized internationally — Impact Factors are very important.

The falling birth rate in Japan means this is more important than ever — we need to attract more overseas students and to do this our universities have to compete on the international stage. University rankings are being used as part of that program.