Candidate universities are selected based on two criteria. First, the candidate should either be a sports university or have sport-related unit(s). Second, the sports university or sport-related unit(s) should have published a certain number of papers recorded in the Web of Science for the past five years (actively engaging in research).

Universities are ranked by several indicators of academic or research performance, including papers indexed in Web of Science, total citations, citations per paper, papers published in the top 25% journals, and the percentage of internationally collaborated papers. 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.

RESEARCH OUTPUT

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

PUB refers to the total number of papers indexed in the Web of Science between 2017 and 2021. Both 'Article' and ‘Review’ typed publications are considered.

CIT - Citations to papers  (20%)

CIT refers to the total number of citations received between 2017 and 2021 to papers published by an institution between 2017 and 2021.

RESEARCH QUALITY

CPP - Citations per paper (30%)

CPP is citations per paper between 2017 and 2021 and the average number of CPP is used for the ranking.

TOP - Papers published in top 25% journals (20%)

TOP is the number of papers published in the top 25% of journals between 2017 and 2021. The top 25% of journals have an impact factor in the top 25% of the Journal Citation Report, 2021.

INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION

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

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