The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings are created using the world’s largest invitation-only academic opinion survey. The survey, available in 12 languages, uses United Nations data as a guide to ensure that the response coverage is as representative of world scholarship as possible. The questionnaire, which is run in-house by THE, targets only experienced, published scholars, who offer their views on excellence in research and teaching within their disciplines and at institutions with which they are familiar. The 2023 rankings are based on a survey carried out between October 2022 and January 2023, which received a total of 38,796 responses from 166 countries.

In the survey, scholars are questioned in terms of their knowledge of their specific disciplines. They are not asked to create rankings themselves or to list a large range of institutions; they only name, at most, 15 universities that they believe are the best in both research and teaching in their field. The two scores for research and teaching are combined at a ratio of 2:1, giving more weight to research because our expert advisers have suggested that there is greater confidence in respondents’ ability to make accurate judgements about research quality.

The Reputation Rankings’ scores are based on the number of times that an institution is cited by respondents as being one of the best in their field. The number one institution is the one selected most often and it receives a score of 100. The scores for all other institutions in the table are expressed as a percentage of this institution’s score. This scoring system, which differs from that used in the THE World University Rankings, is intended to give a clearer and more meaningful perspective on the reputation data in isolation.