General information on ranking

Name of the ranking QS World University Rankings
Geographical scope Global
Name of person in charge of ranking Ben Sowter
E-mail of person in charge of ranking ben@qs.com
Website of the ranking https://www.topuniversities.com/university-ranking...
Publication frequency annual
First year of publication 2004
Most recent year of publication 2016
Date of last update 2017-03-01
Ranking organization Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd (QS)
Website of the methodology https://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings/methodology
Methodology

The QS World University Rankings® are designed to help prospective students make informed comparisons of leading universities around the world. Based on six performance indicators, the ranking assesses university performance across four areas: research, teaching, employability and internationalization.

Each of the six indicators carries a different weighting when calculating the overall scores (see below). Four of the indicators are based on ‘hard’ data, and the remaining two are based on major global surveys – one of academics and another of employers – each the largest of their kind.

Academic reputation (40%)

Academic reputation is measured using a global survey, in which academics are asked to identify the institutions where they believe the best work is currently taking place within their own field of expertise. The aim is to give prospective students a sense of the consensus of opinion within the international academic community. For the 2016-17 edition, a total of 74,651 academics contributed. Regional weightings are applied to counter any discrepancies in response rates.

Employer reputation (10%)

The employer reputation indicator is also based on a global survey, this time asking employers to identify the universities they perceive to be producing the best graduates. This indicator is unique among international university rankings. Its purpose is to give students a better sense of how universities are viewed in the graduate jobs market. A higher weighting is given to votes for universities that come from employers based in other countries, so this indicator is especially useful for prospective students seeking to identify institutions with a reputation that extends beyond their national borders. The 2016-17 edition draws on responses from 37,781 graduate employers.

Student-to-faculty ratio (20%)

This is a simple measure of the number of academic staff employed relative to the number of students enrolled. In the absence of an international standard by which to measure teaching quality, this indicator aims to identify the universities that are best equipped to provide small class sizes and a good level of individual supervision.

Citations per faculty (20%)

This indicator aims to assess universities’ research impact. A ‘citation’ means a piece of research being cited (referred to) within another piece of research. Generally, the more often a piece of research is cited, the more influential it is. So the more highly cited research papers a university publishes, the stronger its research output is considered.

QS collects this information using Scopus, the world’s largest database of research abstracts and citations. The latest five complete years of data are used, and the total citation count is assessed in relation to the number of academic faculty members at the university, so that larger institutions do not have an unfair advantage. For the 2016-17 rankings, QS analyzed 10.3 million research papers and 66.3 million citations.

For the 2015-16 edition of the QS World University Rankings, several refinements were introduced to the way this indicator is assessed, with the aim of providing a more balanced reflection of research impact across different faculty areas.

International faculty ratio (5%) & international student ratio (5%)

The last two indicators aim to assess how successful a university has been in attracting students and academics from other nations. This is based on the proportion of international students and faculty members at the institution. Each of these indicators contributes 5% to the overall ranking results.

Since the QS World University Rankings were first developed in 2004, they have expanded to rank more than 900 universities in 2016-17, with over 3,800 assessed. The top 400 universities are given individual ranking positions, and the rest are ranked in groups – starting from 401-410, up to 701+. The results are published in an interactive ranking table, which can be sorted by country/region and by each of the six performance indicators.

 

Additional information

  • Type of publication: internet, mobile application, print - special publication
  • Internet users access to ranking: open access
  • Language of publication: English
  • Main target groups: employers, higher education institutions, students and parents
  • Level of comparison: institutional
  • Major dimensions covered: employability, internationalization, reputation, research, teaching
  • Structure of presentation: ordinary presentation (league tables)
  • Data sources: data collected from HEIs by ranking organization, survey conducted exclusively by ranking organization, third-party database (data not provided by HEI)
  • Quality assurance of ranking: advisory board, certification (e.g. IREG Audit)
  • Website of the ranking organization: https://www.topuniversities.com/about-qs
  • Types of the ranking organization: commercial/for-profit (incl. media)