In ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2020, institutions are ranked in 54 academic subjects across 5 broad areas: Natural sciences, Engineering, Life sciences, Medical sciences, and Social sciences. Different weights are allocated to the indicators for different subjects. The following indicators are used in the ranking:

Q1 - The number of papers authored by an institution in an Academic Subject in journals with Q1 Journal Impact Factor Quartile during the period of 2014-2018. Only papers of 'Article' type are considered. Data are collected from Web of Science and InCites. Papers in different Web of Science categories are grouped into relevant Academic Subjects 

CNCI - Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) is the ratio of citation of papers published by an institution in an Academic Subject during the period of  2014-2018 to the average citation of papers in the same category, of the same year and same type. A CNCI value of 1 represents world-average performance while a value above 1 represents performance above the world average. Only papers of 'Article' type are considered. Data are collected from InCites database.

IC - International collaboration (IC) is the number of publications that have been found with at least two different countries in addresses of the authors divided by the total number of publications in an Academic Subject for an institution during the period of 2014-2018 . Only papers of ‘Article’ type are considered. Data are collected from InCites database.

TOP - The number of papers published in Top Journals in an Academic Subject for an institution during the period of 2014-2018. Top Journals are identified through ShanghaiRanking’s Academic Excellence Survey.  In 2020, 151 top journals selected by the Survey are used in rankings of 47 Academic Subjects. In Computer Science & Engineering, 22 selected top conferences are also taken into account. Only papers of ‘Article’ type are considered for this indicator. But in the subject of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, both ‘Article’ and ‘Review’ are counted because only one journal in this subject was selected as Top journal and it mainly publishes reviews.

AWARD - Refers to the total number of the staff of an institution winning a significant award in an Academic Subject since 1981. Staff is defined as those who work full-time at an institution at the time of winning the prize. If a researcher was retired at the time of winning the award,  the institution where the researcher’s last full-time academic position was at is counted. The significant awards in each subject are identified through ShanghaiRanking’s Academic Excellence Survey. If a winner is affiliated with more than one institution at the time of winning the award, each institution is assigned the reciprocal of the number of institutions. If the award is awarded to more than one winner in one year, weights are set for winners according to their proportion of the prize. Different weights are set according to the periods of winning the prizes. The weight is 100% for winners in 2011-2018, 75% for winners in 2001-2010, 50% for winners in 1991-2000, and 25% for winners in 1981-1990. Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is selected for Biological Sciences, Human Biological Sciences, Clinical Medicine and Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences. Winners of this award are assigned to one or more subjects according to the topics of their recognized contributions. If a contribution belongs to more than one subject, the winner will be counted once for each relevant subject.

Adaptive Weights. Different weights are allocated to the indicators for different subjects, depending on its specific research culture, publication rates or the citation of papers ratio. All five indicators are used for 25 out of 54 subjets included in the ranking. Q1, CNCI and IC are indicators considered for all subjects. AWARD indicator and  TOP indicator are not cosidered for some subjects, e.g. Oceanography, Telecommunication Engineering, Agricultural Sciences, Medical Technology, etc.