“There will always be a resistance to sourced data”
Sourced data is actually welcome, but you still have to figure out where the data come from and how the conclusions were derived. In this case published research, citations is pretty reasonable but that would favor research universities and there’s no guarantee you can take a class or do research with the professor. And since it’s a total number and not per-capita, it’s definitely going to favor larger depts. Any ranking with a top five of Harvard, MIT, UCB, Chicago, Princeton is probably not going to questioned but note that BU at 11, MSU at 23 ad Duke at 26 seems a little odd. And the first LAC doesn’t appear till 52.