Inconsistent year-to-year fluctuations limit the conclusiveness of global higher education rankings for university management.

Backround. University rankings are getting very high international media attention, this holds particularly true for the Times Higher Education Ranking (THE) and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities Ranking (ARWU). We therefore aimed to investigate how reliable the rankings are, especially for universities with lower ranking positions, that often show inconclusive year-to-year fluctuations in their rank, and if these rankings are thus a suitable basis for management purposes.