The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2020 includes almost 1,400 universities across 92 countries, standing as the largest and most diverse university rankings ever to date.
The table is based on 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators that measure an institution’s performance across teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.
The only university ranking to be independently audited by professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, and trusted worldwide by students, teachers, governments and industry experts, this year’s league table provides great insight into the shifting balance of power in global higher education.
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings are the only global performance tables that judge research-intensive universities across all their core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. We use 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons, trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments.
The performance indicators are grouped into five areas: Teaching (the learning environment); Research (volume, income and reputation); Citations (research influence); International outlook (staff, students and research); and Industry Income (knowledge transfer).
Teaching (the learning environment): 30%
- Reputation survey: 15%
- Staff-to-student ratio: 4.5%
- Doctorate-to-bachelor’s ratio: 2.25%
- Doctorates-awarded-to-academic-staff ratio: 6%
- Institutional income: 2.25%
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The most recent Academic Reputation Survey (run annually) that underpins this category was carried out between November 2018 and March 2019. It examined the perceived prestige of institutions in teaching. The responses were statistically representative of the global academy’s geographical and subject mix. The 2019 data are combined with the results of the 2018 survey, giving more than 21,000 responses.
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 thus 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 is scaled against academic staff numbers and normalised for purchasing-power parity (PPP). 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: 18%
- Research income: 6%
- Research productivity: 6%
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 is scaled against academic staff numbers and adjusted for purchasing-power parity (PPP). This is a controversial indicator because it can be influenced by national policy and economic circumstances. But income is crucial to the development of world-class research, and because much of it is subject to competition and judged by peer review, our experts suggested that it was a valid measure. 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.
To measure productivity we count the number of publications published in the academic journals indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database per scholar, scaled for institutional size and normalised for subject. This gives a sense of the university’s ability to get papers published in quality peer-reviewed journals. Last year, we devised a method to give credit for papers that are published in subjects where a university declares no staff.
Citations (research influence): 30%
Our research influence indicator looks at universities’ role in spreading new knowledge and ideas.
We examine research influence by capturing the average number of times a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally. This year, our bibliometric data supplier Elsevier examined 77.4 million citations to 12.8 million journal articles, article reviews, conference proceedings, books and book chapters published over five years. The data include more than 23,400 academic journals indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database and all indexed publications between 2014 and 2018. Citations to these publications made in the six years from 2014 to 2019 are also collected.
The citations help to show us how much each university is contributing to the sum of human knowledge: they tell us whose research has stood out, has been picked up and built on by other scholars and, most importantly, has been shared around the global scholarly community to expand the boundaries of our understanding, irrespective of discipline.
The data are normalised to reflect variations in citation volume between different subject areas. This means that institutions with high levels of research activity in subjects with traditionally high citation counts do not gain an unfair advantage.
We have blended equal measures of a country-adjusted and non-country-adjusted raw measure of citations scores.
In 2015-16, we excluded papers with more than 1,000 authors because they were having a disproportionate impact on the citation scores of a small number of universities. In 2016-17, we designed a method for reincorporating these papers. Working with Elsevier, we developed a fractional counting approach that ensures that all universities where academics are authors of these papers will receive at least 5 per cent of the value of the paper, and where those that provide the most contributors to the paper receive a proportionately larger contribution.
International outlook (staff, students, research): 7.5%
- Proportion of international students: 2.5%
- Proportion of international staff: 2.5%
- International collaboration: 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.
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 (knowledge transfer): 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 (adjusted for PPP), scaled against the number of academic staff it employs.
The category suggests the extent to which businesses are willing to pay for research and a university’s ability to attract funding in the commercial marketplace – useful indicators of institutional quality.