  The demand for global university league tables has been high over the past
two decades. However, significant criticism of their methodologies is
accumulating without being addressed. I revisit global university league tables
by normalizing each field as to create a uniform distribution of value. Then,
the overall performance of an institution is interpreted as the probability of
having a high score in any given academic field. I focus on the similarity of
institutions across ten criteria related to academic performance in eighty
subjects of all fields of knowledge. The latter does not induce a zero-sum
game, removing one of the most prominent negative features of established
league tables. The present assessment shows that the main difference between
hundreds of leading global research universities is whether their coverage of
all areas of human knowledge is comprehensive or specialized, as their mean
performance per subject is nearly indistinguishable. I compare the results with
the main league tables and found excellent agreement, suggesting that
regardless of their methodologies, research-intensive institutions perform well
in rankings if they are comprehensive. This comprehensiveness is ultimately
dependent on institutional age, privileged funding allocation and regional
academic culture. Consequently, when the size of an institution is taken out of
the picture, I found no correlation between comprehensiveness and quality, and
no difference can be found in the mean quality of institutions regionally or
globally. Furthermore, I find the reputation and prestige of several famous
institutions to far exceed their performance within the present methodology,
while numerous institutions with less reputation and visibility perform better
than expected.
