QS World University Rankings by Subject Methodology - times university ranking methodology

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• (1) 2020 times higher education ranking
• (2) The world university rankings 2020
• (3) Criteria for university ranking
• (4) Time higher education ranking 2022

SUBJECT TABLES METHODOLOGY
Version 0.3
Last updated: 28 March 2011
Copyright ? 2010 QS Intelligence Unit (a division of QS Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd)
Contents
Background................................................................................................................................................. 3
Subject Disciplines Considered....................................................................................................... 4
Indicators...................................................................................................................................................... 5
Academic Reputation (Academic) ................................................................................5
Employer Reputation (Employer)..................................................................................7
Citations per Paper (Citations).......................................................................................9
Additional Indicators ............................................Error! Bookmark not defined.
Adaptive Compilation.........................................................................................................................11
Final Screening........................................................................................................................................12
Aggregation .............................................................................................................................................13
Deployment Schedule & Strategy...............................................................................................13
Page 2
Background
The QS World University Rankings? have been in existence since 2004 and have become the world's
favourite reference for comparing international higher education institutions at an overall and, to a
degree, faculty area level. In that time they have evolved considerably but since 2007 have maintained
a stable methodology and yielded increasingly robust and insightful results.
There is, however, a clear demand for ways to compare the effectiveness of institutions in narrower
subject disciplines - after all many prospective international students know first WHAT they want to
study before asking the question of WHERE they want to study.
At a holistic level, any ranking that has ambitions to be truly global is limited by the availability of data
from every part of its scope - this is why, in general, many indicators of university quality commonly
used in domestic rankings are not included in any of these exercises. While the depth of data available
from the UK, Australia and the US may be exemplary it is yet to be matched by that in India, Greece or
Brazil, for example.
When attempting to exercise evaluations at a more granular level this becomes even more complex -
while it may be reasonable to expect a university to have a decent understanding of its average
faculty-student ratio, to break that down by faculty or department is difficult in even the most
advanced cultures of data provision.
There are, however, some indicators that transcend the direct involvement of the institutions and can
be better stratified by subject discipline. This document outlines the QS approach for doing so, which
has been used to produce the new QS World University Rankings? by Subject.
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