The QS World University Rankings by Subject ranks the world’s top universities in individual subject areas, covering 51 subjects in 5 broad areas: Arts & Humanities, Engineering & Technology, Life Sciences & Medicinie, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences & Management.  Each of the subject rankings is compiled using four sources. The first two of these are QS’s global surveys of academics and employers, which are used to assess institutions’ international reputation in each subject. The second two indicators assess research impact. These four components are combined to produce the results for each of the subject rankings, with weightings adapted for each discipline.

ACADEMIC REPUTATION (30%-90%)

QS’s global survey of academics has been at the heart of the QS World University Rankings since their inception in 2004. In 2020, the QS World University Rankings by Subject draws on responses from  95,000 academics worldwide. For each of the faculty areas they identify (up to five), respondents are asked to list up to 10 domestic and 30 international institutions which they consider to be excellent for research in the given area. They are not able to select their own institution.

For the QS World University Rankings by Subject, the results of the survey are filtered according to the narrow area of expertise identified by respondents. While academics can select up to two narrow areas of expertise, greater emphasis is placed on respondents who have identified only one.

EMPLOYER REPUTATION (5%-50%)

The QS World University Rankings are unique in incorporating employability as a key factor in the evaluation of international universities. In 2020, the QS World University Rankings by Subject draws on 45,000 survey responses from graduate employers worldwide. Employers are asked to identify up to 10 domestic and 30 international institutions they consider excellent for the recruitment of graduates. They are also asked to identify the disciplines from which they prefer to recruit. By examining the intersection of these two questions, a measure of excellence in a given discipline is inferred.

RESEARCH CITATIONS PER PAPER (5%-30% or N/A)

QS World University Rankings by Subject measures citations per paper, rather than citations per faculty member. This is due to the impracticality of reliably gathering faculty numbers broken down by discipline for each institution. A minimum publication threshold is set for each subject to avoid potential anomalies stemming from small numbers of highly cited papers. Both the minimum publications threshold and the weighting applied to the citations indicator are adapted in order to best reflect prevalent publication and citation patterns in a given discipline. All citations data is sourced from the Scopus, spanning a five-year period.

H-INDEX (5%-30% or N/A)

The h-index is a way of measuring both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar.

Adaptive Weightings. As research cultures, publication rates and the popularity of particular disciplines amongst employers vary significantly across academic disciplines, a variable approach to the weightings for the different subjects is applied. For example, in medicine, where publication rates are very high, research citations and the h-index account for 25% of each university’s total score. On the other hand, in areas with much lower publication rates such as history, these research-related indicators only account for 15% of the total ranking score. Meanwhile in subjects such as art and design, where there are too few papers published to be statistically significant, the ranking is based solely on the employer and academic surveys. Similarly the popularity of particular disciplines amongst employers varies greatly, and placing the same emphasis on employer opinion in economics and philosophy therefore makes little sense.