In calculating the top universities in Asia, the Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings 2020 use the same 13 performance indicators as the THE World University Rankings, but they are recalibrated to reflect the attributes of Asia’s institutions.

TEACHING (the learning environment) 25%

Reputation survey (10%)

The most recent Academic Reputation Survey that underpins this category was carried out between November 2018 and March 2019. It examined the perceived prestige of institutions in teaching. The Academic Reputation Survey 2019 data are combined with the results of the 2018 survey, giving over  21,000 responses.

Staff-to-student ratio (4.5%)

Doctorate-to-bachelor’s ratio (2.25%)

Doctorates-awarded-to-academic-staff ratio (6%)

Institutional income (2.25%)

RESEARCH (volume, income and reputation) 30%

Reputation survey (15%)

This indicator is based on the responses to annual Academic Reputation Survey.

Research income (7.5%)

This indicator is fully normalised to take account of each university’s distinct subject profile.

Research productivity (7.5%)

To measure productivity THE counts the number of papers published in the academic journals indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database per scholar, scaled for institutional size and normalised for subject.

CITATIONS (research influence) 30%

It is average number of times a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally. In 2019 THE bibliometric data supplier Elsevier examined  77.4 million citations to more than  23,400 million journal articles, conference proceedings and books and book chapters published over five years. The data include the 23,000 academic journals indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database and all indexed publications between 2014 and 2018. Citations to these publications made in the six years from 2014 to 2019 are also collected.

INTERNATIONAL OUTLOOK (staff, students, research) 7.5%

International-to-domestic-student ratio (2.5%)

International-to-domestic-staff ratio (2.5%)

International collaboration (2.5%)

The proportion of a university’s total research journal publications that have at least one international co-author and reward higher volumes.

INDUSTRY INCOME (knowledge transfer)  7.5%

This category seeks to capture such knowledge-transfer activity by looking at how much research income an institution earns from industry (adjusted for PPP), scaled against the number of academic staff it employs.