The US News Best Global Universities Rankings is based on 13 indicators that measure academic research performance and global and regional reputations of universities. They are grouped in three areas: reputation, bibliometrics and scientific excellence. Each of the university's profile pages on usnews.com lists the overall global score as well as numerical ranks for the 13 indicators, allowing users to compare each university's standing in each indicator.

REPUTATION INDICATORS

Global research reputation (12.5%) - This indicator reflects the aggregation of the most recent five years of results of the Clarivate Analytics' Academic Reputation Survey for the best universities globally for research.

Regional research reputation (12.5%) - This indicator reflects the aggregation of the most recent five years of results of the Clarivate Analytics'Academic Reputation Survey for the best universities for research in the region.

BIBLIOMETRIC INDICATORS

Publications (10%) - This is a measure of the overall research productivity of a university, based on the total number of scholarly papers - reviews, articles and notes – that are published in high-quality, impactful journals.

Books (2.5%) -  This ranking indicator provides a useful supplement to the data on articles and better represents universities that have a focus on social sciences and arts and humanities.

Conferences (2.5%) - Academic conferences are an important venue for scholarly communication, particularly in disciplines tied to engineering and computer science.

Normalized citation impact (10%) - The total number of citations per paper represents the overall impact of the research of the university and is independent of the size or age of the university; the value is normalized.

Total citations (7.5%) - Total citations have been normalized to overcome differences in research area, publication year of the paper and publication type.

Number of publications that are among the 10 percent most cited (12.5%) - This indicator reflects the number of papers that have been assigned as being in the top 10 percent of the most highly cited papers in the world for their respective fields.

Percentage of total publications that are among the 10 percent most cited (10%) - This indicator is the percentage of a university's total papers that are among the top 10% of the most highly cited papers in the world – per field and publication year.

International collaboration – relative to country (5%) - The proportion of the institution's total papers that contain international co-authors divided by the proportion of internationally co-authored papers for the country that the university is in.

International collaboration (5%) - The proportion of the institution's total papers that contain international co-authors.

SCIENTIFIC EXCELLENCE INDICATORS

Number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1 percent most cited in their respective field (5%) - This indicator shows the volume of papers classified as highly cited in the Clarivate Analytics' service known as Essential Science Indicators.

Percentage of total publications that are among the top 1 percent most highly cited papers (5%) - This percent of highly cited papers shows the number of highly cited papers for a university divided by the total number of documents it produces.