The surprise showing of Alexandria University, in Egypt, at 147th place in the Times Higher Education’s recent tabulation of the world’s top universities has cast a spotlight on the “questionable science” behind university rankings, The New York Times reports. The university was the only Arab institution in the top 200, and its showing was the result of the prolific output of a single scholar, Mohamed El Naschie, an Egyptian academic “who published over 320 of his own articles in a scientific journal of which he was also the editor.” A single academic’s ability to skew the results so significantly raises questions about the methodology behind the rankings.