Mislabel Detection of Finnish Publication Ranks

Finland, in the spirit of Norway and Denmark, introduced ranking system for academic publication channels (referring to scientific journals, conference series, book publishers etc.) called as Jufo (i.e. "Julkaisufoorumi" in Finnish, "Publication Forum" in English) in 2010, together with the renewed university legislation. The ranking of a publication channel, ranging from 0 (non-peer- reviewed) to 3 (most distinguished academic publication forums), is decided by a specially nominated panel of a particular scientific discipline. These panels decide the rankings based on their academic expertise in regular meetings. Because the rankings are directly linked to the allocated funding of the universities, there has been and is a lot of discussion about the fairness and objectivity of the ranks. A versatile analysis of the 2015 Jufo-rankings was done in [10]. There, by using association rule mining, decision trees, and confusion matrices with respect to Norwegian and Danish ranks, it was shown that most of the expert-based rankings could be predicted and explained with machine learning methods. Moreover, it was found out that those publication channels, for which the Finnish expert-based rank is higher than the estimated one, are characterized by higher publication activity or recent upgrade of the rank. Hence, the outcomes of the system, the publication ranks, need to be assessed and evaluated regularly and rigorously. 1