The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings are created using the world’s largest invitation-only academic opinion survey – a unique piece of research. The Academic Reputation Survey, available in 15 languages, uses United Nations data as a guide to ensure the response coverage is as representative of world scholarship as possible. It is also evenly spread across academic disciplines.

The questionnaire, administered on behalf of THE by Elsevier, targets only experienced, published scholars, who offer their views on excellence in research and teaching within their disciplines and at institutions with which they are familiar. The 2016 rankings are based on a survey carried out between January 2016 and March 2016, which received a total of 10,323 responses from 133 countries.

In the survey, scholars are questioned at the level of their specific subject discipline. They are not asked to create a ranking themselves or to list a large range of institutions, but to name no more than 15 universities that they believe are the best in each category (research and teaching), based on their own experience.

The reputation table ranks institutions according to an overall measure of their esteem that combines data on their reputation for research and teaching. The two scores are combined at a ratio of 2:1, giving more weight to research because feedback from expert advisers suggests that there is greater confidence in respondents’ ability to make accurate judgements about research quality.

The scores are based on the number of times an institution is cited by respondents as being the best in their field. The number one institution, Harvard University, was the one selected most often. The scores for all other institutions in the table are expressed as a percentage of Harvard’s, which is set at 100. For example, the University of Oxford received 67.6 per cent of the number of nominations that Harvard received, giving it a score of 67.6 against Harvard’s 100. This scoring system, which differs from the one used in the THE World University Rankings, is intended to provide a clearer and more meaningful perspective on the reputation data in isolation.