In recent years global rankings by subject have become popular, providing students and other stakeholders with a more relevant and finely grained approach to comparative assessment.
These rankings are based on two indicators from the QS world rankings, academic reputation and employer reputation, and two that are specific to this ranking, h-index and citations per paper. The latter two might be considered measures of research quality. The weighting of the indicators varies according to discipline. In medicine the h-index and citations accounted for half of the total weighting but only 15% in history while art and design was assessed only by performance on the surveys.
Overall, it seems that this year the performance of the US has declined while that of British universities has improved somewhat. According to a report in University World News the performance of Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands has declined and that of China has improved but at a slower pace than in previous years. Russia has also improved.
The number of top places in 51 disciplines by country is as follows:
USA 34
UK 12
Switzerland 4
Netherlands 2
Singapore 2
Italy 1
Sweden 1
Sources