The ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Sport Science Schools and Departments 2020 uses five performance indicators of academic or research performance grouped into three criteria. For each indicator, the highest scoring institution is assigned a score of 100, and other institutions are calculated as a percentage of the top score. Scores for each indicator are weighted as shown below to arrive at a final overall score for an institution.
Candidate universities are selected based on two criteria. First, the candidate should either be a sport university or have sport-related unit(s). Second, the sport university or sport-related unit(s) should publish a certain number of Web of Science papers  (actively engaging in research) in the past five years. In total, 429 universities with their 485  sport-related units are selected and ranked.

RESEARCH OUTPUT

PUB - Papers indexed in Web of Science (20%)

PUB refers to the total number of papers indexed in Web of Science between 2015 and 2019. Both publications of 'Article' and ‘Review’ ’type are considered.

CIT - Citations to papers  (20%)

CIT refers to the total number of citations received between 2015 and 2019 to papers published by an institution between 2015 and 2019.

RESEARCH QUALITY

CPP - Citations per paper (25%)

CPP is citations per paper between 2015 and 2019 and measures the average number of times a paper is cited for.

TOP - Papers published in top 25% journals (25%)

TOP is the number of papers published in top 25% journals between 2015 and 2019. The top 25% journals are those with an impact factor in the top 25% according to Journal Citation Report, 2019.

INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION

IC - Percentage of papers  with international co-authorship (10%)

IC refers to the percentage of internationally collaborated papers to all papers.