THE Impact Rankings assess universities against the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The ranking uses carefully caibrated indicators to provide comprehensive and balanced comparisons across four areas: research, outreach, stewardship and teaching.

Research: the most obvious and traditional way that a university might help deliver the SDGs is by creating research in relevant topics.

Stewardship: universities are custodians of significant resources; not just physical resources, but also their employees, faculty and students. How they act as stewards is one of the key factors in delivering the SDGs.

Outreach: place is critical in higher education, and the work that universities do with their local, regional, national and international communities is another key way that they can have an impact on sustainability.

Teaching: teaching plays a critical role, both in ensuring that there are enough skilled practitioners to deliver on the SDGs, and in making sure that all alumni take forward the key lessons of sustainability into their future careers.

Universities can submit data on as many of these SDGs as they are able. Each SDG has a series of metrics that are used to evaluate the performance of the university on that SDG, which means there is no common methodology for all SDGs, each SDG has its specific methodology.

Any university that provides data on SDG 17 and at least three other SDGs is included in the overall ranking. As well as the overall ranking, the results of each individual SDG in 17 separate tables are also published. A university’s final score in the overall table is calculated by combining its score in SDG 17 with its top three scores out of the remaining 16 SDGs. SDG 17 accounts for 22% of the overall score, while the other SDGs each carry a weight of 26%. This means that different universities are scored based on a different set of SDGs, depending on their focus.

There are three categories of metrics within each SDG:

Research metrics

They are derived from data supplied by Elsevier. For each SDG, a specific query has been created that narrows the scope of the metric to papers relevant to that SDG.

Continuous metrics

They measure contributions to impact that vary continually across a range – for example, the number of graduates with a health-related degree. These are usually normalised to the size of the institution.

Evidence

When HEIs are asked about policies and initiatives – for example, the existence of mentoring programmes – the metrics require universities to provide the evidence to support their claims. In these cases, credit is given for the evidence and for the evidence being public. These metrics are not usually size normalised.