THE 150 Under 50 Rankings use 13 indicators grouped into five areas:

Teaching (the learning environment): 30%

• Reputation survey: 10%
  This category includes the results of the Academic Reputation Survey carried out from December 2014 to January 2015. It examined the perceived prestige of institutions in teaching. The responses were statistically representative of the global academy’s geographical and subject mix.
• Staff-to-student ratio: 6%
• Doctorate-to-bachelor’s ratio: 3%
• Doctorates awarded to academic staff ratio: 8%
  As well as giving a sense of how committed an institution is to nurturing the next generation of academics, a high proportion of postgraduate research students also suggests the provision of teaching at the highest level that is attractive to graduates and effective at developing them. This indicator is normalised to take account of a university’s unique subject mix, reflecting that the volume of doctoral awards varies by discipline.
• Institutional income: 3%
  This measure of income is scaled against staff numbers and normalised for purchasing-power parity. It indicates an institution’s general status and gives a broad sense of the infrastructure and facilities available to students and staff.

Research (volume, income and reputation): 30%

• Reputation survey: 12%
  The most prominent indicator in this category looks at a university’s reputation for research excellence among its peers, based on the responses to our annual Academic Reputation Survey.
• Research income: 9%
  Research income is scaled against staff numbers and normalised for purchasing-power parity. This indicator is fully normalised to take account of each university’s distinct subject profile, reflecting the fact that research grants in science subjects are often bigger than those awarded for the highest-quality social science, arts and humanities research.
• Research productivity: 9%
  It counts the number of papers published in the academic journals indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database per academic, scaled for a university’s total size and also normalised for subject. This gives an idea of an institution’s ability to get papers published in quality peer-reviewed journals.

Citations (research influence): 30%

Research influence indicator looks at universities’ role in spreading new knowledge and ideas. It examines research influence by capturing the number of times a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally. Elsevier examined more than 51 million citations to 11.3 million journal articles, published over five years. The data are drawn from the 23,000 academic journals indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database and include all indexed journals published between 2010 and 2014. Citations to these papers made in the six years from 2010 to 2015 are also collected.

International outlook (staff, students, research): 7.5%

• International-to-domestic-student ratio: 2.5%
• International-to-domestic-staff ratio: 2.5%
  The ability of a university to attract undergraduates, postgraduates and faculty from all over the planet is key to its success on the world stage.
• Research: 2.5%
  In the third international indicator, we calculate the proportion of a university’s total research journal publications that have at least one international co-author and reward higher volumes. This indicator is normalised to account for a university’s subject mix and uses the same five-year window as the “Citations: research influence” category.

Industry income (innovation): 2.5%

A university’s ability to help industry with innovations, inventions and consultancy has become a core mission of the contemporary global academy. This category seeks to capture such knowledge transfer activity by looking at how much research income an institution earns from industry, scaled against the number of academic staff it employs.