Sir

As Xavier Bosch reports (Nature 402, 848; 1999), the recently publicized ranking of Spanish universities by quality may not be the first such list, but it has had by far the most impact on Spain's mass media. The repercussions are likely to encourage the growth of an evaluation culture in Spanish universities, which is positive. However, I believe the importance of this study has been exaggerated and people have made judgements without evaluating the 71 indicators used by the authors.

I do not see what factors such as “age of the university” or “percentage of women among first-year students” can reveal about the quality of an institution (even though they favoured my university: it is 505 years old and more than two-thirds of its students are women). I did not find any indicator of research quality and there was no evaluation of scientific papers published in leading journals. Nor were patents, contracts or research projects considered.

Given that a university carries out both teaching and research, I estimate that this study has done only half the work.