  The objective assessment of the prestige of an academic institution is a
difficult and hotly debated task. In the last few years, different types of
University Rankings have been proposed to quantify the excellence of different
research institutions in the world. Albeit met with criticism in some cases,
the relevance of university rankings is being increasingly acknowledged:
indeed, rankings are having a major impact on the design of research policies,
both at the institutional and governmental level. Yet, the debate on what
rankings are {\em exactly} measuring is enduring. Here, we address the issue by
measuring a quantitive and reliable proxy of the academic reputation of a given
institution and by evaluating its correlation with different university
rankings. Specifically, we study citation patterns among universities in five
different Web of Science Subject Categories and use the \pr~algorithm on the
five resulting citation networks. The rationale behind our work is that
scientific citations are driven by the reputation of the reference so that the
PageRank algorithm is expected to yield a rank which reflects the reputation of
an academic institution in a specific field. Our results allow to quantifying
the prestige of a set of institutions in a certain research field based only on
hard bibliometric data. Given the volume of the data analysed, our findings are
statistically robust and less prone to bias, at odds with ad--hoc surveys often
employed by ranking bodies in order to attain similar results. Because our
findings are found to correlate extremely well with the ARWU Subject rankings,
the approach we propose in our paper may open the door to new, Academic Ranking
methodologies that go beyond current methods by reconciling the qualitative
evaluation of Academic Prestige with its quantitative measurements via
publication impact.
