Times Higher Education World University Rankings

Times Higher Education World University Rankings

Editor	Phil Baty
Categories	Higher education
Frequency	Annual
Publisher	Times Higher Education
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Website	Times Higher Education World University Rankings

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings (or THE World University Rankings) are annual world university rankings published by the British magazine Times Higher Education (THE) with data supplied by Thomson Reuters that provides citation database information. They include both the overall and the subject rankings. Moreover, the additional World Reputation Rankings which are independent of the main rankings have also been released starting from 2011.

Originally, the Times Higher Education began publishing the Times Higher Education–QS World University Rankings in 2004 with Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) but they ended their partnership in 2010 and both started to release their own rankings. QS has published its rankings with the old existing methodology as the QS World University Rankings, while Times created and adopted a new one.

Today, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings are regarded to be one of the three most influential and widely observed international university rankings, along with the QS World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU).^[1][2][3]

History

The creation of the original Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings was credited in Ben Wildavsky's book, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World,^[4] to then-editor of Times Higher Education, John O'Leary. Times Higher Education chose to partner with educational and careers advice company QS to supply the data.

After the 2009 rankings, Times Higher Education took the decision to break from QS and signed an agreement with Thomson Reuters to provide the data for its annual World University Rankings from 2010 onwards. The publication developed a new rankings methodology in consultation with its readers, its editorial board and Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters will collect and analyse the data used to produce the rankings on behalf of Times Higher Education. The first ranking was published in September 2010.^[5]

Commenting on Times Higher Education's decision to split from QS, former editor Ann Mroz said: "universities deserve a rigorous, robust and transparent set of rankings – a serious tool for the sector, not just an annual curiosity." She went on to explain the reason behind the decision to continue to produce rankings without QS' involvement, saying that: "The responsibility weighs heavy on our shoulders...we feel we have a duty to improve how we compile them."^[6]

Phil Baty, editor of the new Times Higher Education World University Rankings, admitted in Inside Higher Ed: "The rankings of the world's top universities that my magazine has been publishing for the past six years, and which have attracted enormous global attention, are not good enough. In fact, the surveys of reputation, which made up 40 percent of scores and which Times Higher Education until recently defended, had serious weaknesses. And it's clear that our research measures favored the sciences over the humanities."^[7]

He went on to describe previous attempts at peer review as "embarrassing" in The Australian: "The sample was simply too small, and the weighting too high, to be taken seriously."^[8] THE published its first rankings using its new methodology on 16 September 2010, a month earlier than previous years.^[9]

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings, along with the QS World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities are described to be the three most influential international university rankings.^[10][11] The Globe and Mail in 2010 described the Times Higher Education World University Rankings to be "arguably the most influential."^[12]

Methodology of the major rankings

The inaugural 2010-2011 methodology is 13 separate indicators grouped under five categories: Teaching (30 percent of final score), research (30 percent), citations (research impact) (worth 32.5 percent), international mix (5 percent), industry income (2.5 percent). The number of indicators is up from the Times-QS rankings published between 2004 and 2009, which used six indicators.^[13]

A draft of the methodology was released on 3 June 2010. The draft stated that 13 indicators would first be used and that this could rise to 16 in future rankings, and laid out the categories of indicators as "research indicators" (55 percent), "institutional indicators" (25 percent), "economic activity/innovation" (10 percent), and "international diversity" (10 percent).^[14] The names of the categories and the weighting of each was modified in the final methodology, released on 16 September 2010.^[13] The final methodology also included the weighting signed to each of the 13 indicators, shown below:^[13]

The Times Higher Education billed the methodology as "robust, transparent and sophisticated," stating that the final methodology was selected after considering 10 months of "detailed consultation with leading experts in global higher education," 250 pages of feedback from "50 senior figures across every continent" and 300 postings on its website.^[13] The overall ranking score was calculated by making Z-scores all datasets to standardize different data types on a common scale to better make comparisons among data.^[13]

The reputational component of the rankings (34.5 percent of the overall score – 15 percent for teaching and 19.5 percent for research) came from an Academic Reputation Survey conducted by Thomson Reuters in spring 2010. The survey gathered 13,388 responses among scholars "statistically representative of global higher education's geographical and subject mix."^[13] The magazine's category for "industry income – innovation" came from a sole indicator, institution's research income from industry scaled against the number of academic staff." The magazine stated that it used this data as "proxy for high-quality knowledge transfer" and planned to add more indicators for the category in future years.^[13]

Data for citation impact (measured as a normalized average citation per paper), comprising 32.5 percent of the overall score, came from 12,000 academic journals indexed by Thomson Reuters' large Web of Science database over the five years from 2004 to 2008. The Times stated that articles published in 2009–2010 have not yet completely accumulated in the database.^[13] The normalization of the data differed from the previous rankings system and is intended to "reflect variations in citation volume between different subject areas," so that institutions with high levels of research activity in the life sciences and other areas with high citation counts will not have an unfair advantage over institutions with high levels of research activity in the social sciences, which tend to use fewer citations on average.^[13]

The magazine announced on 5 September 2011 that its 2011–2012 World University Rankings would be published on 6 October 2011.^[15] At the same time, the magazine revealed changes to the ranking formula that will be introduced with the new rankings. The methodology will continue to use 13 indicators across five broad categories and will keep its "fundamental foundations," but with some changes. Teaching and research will each remain 30 percent of the overall score, and industry income will remain at 2.5 percent. However, a new "international outlook – staff, students and research" will be introduced and will make up 7.5 percent of the final score. This category will include the proportion of international staff and students at each institution (included in the 2011–2012 ranking under the category of "international diversity"), but will also add the proportion of research papers published by each institution that are co-authored with at least one international partner. One 2011–2012 indicator, the institution's public research income, will be dropped.^[15]

On 13 September 2011, the Times Higher Education announced that its 2011–2012 list will only rank the top 200 institutions. Phil Baty wrote that this was in the "interests of fairness," because "the lower down the tables you go, the more the data bunch up and the less meaningful the differentials between institutions become." However, Baty wrote that the rankings would include 200 institutions that fall immediately outside the official top 200 according to its data and methodology, but this "best of the rest" list from 201 to 400 would be unranked and listed alphabetically. Baty wrote that the magazine intentionally only ranks around 1 percent of the world's universities in a recognition that "not every university should aspire to be one of the global research elite."^[16]

The methodology of the rankings has been refined during the 2011-12 rankings process, the details of the new methodology can be found here.^[17] Phil Baty, the rankings editor, has said that the THE World University Rankings are the only global university rankings to examine a university’s teaching environment, as others focus purely on research.^[18] Baty has also written that the THE World University Rankings are the only rankings to put arts and humanities and social sciences research on an equal footing to the sciences.^[19]

Reception

The reception to the methodology was varied.

Ross Williams of the Melbourne Institute, commenting on the 2010–2011 draft, stated that the proposed methodology would favour more focused "science-based institutions with relatively few undergraduates" at the expense of institutions with more comprehensive programmes and undergraduates, but also stated that the indicators were "academically robust" overall and that the use of scaled measures would reward productivity rather than overall influence.^[20] Steve Smith, president of Universities UK, praised the new methodology as being "less heavily weighted towards subjective assessments of reputation and uses more robust citation measures," which "bolsters confidence in the evaluation method."^[21] David Willetts, British Minister of State for Universities and Science praised the rankings, noting that "reputation counts for less this time, and the weight accorded to quality in teaching and learning is greater."^[22]

Criticism

Times Higher Education gives much importance to citations on their ranking. This has been criticised for undermining universities that do not use English as their primary language.^[23] Citations and publications in a language different from English are harder to come across.^[24] A second important disadvantage for universities of non Anglo-Saxon tradition is that within the disciplines of social sciences and humanities the main tool for publications are books which are not or only rarely covered by citations records.^[25]

World University Rankings

Overall rankings

There is a total of 400 universities being ranked and the top 50 are as follows (according to the latest result):

Times Higher Education World University Rankings — Top 50

2013-14[26]	2012-13[27]	2011-12[28]	2010-11[29]	Institute	Region
1	1	1	2	California Institute of Technology	United States
2	4	2	1	Harvard University	United States
2	2	4	6	University of Oxford	United Kingdom
4	3	2	4	Stanford University	United States
5	5	7	3	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	United States
6	6	5	5	Princeton University	United States
7	7	6	6	University of Cambridge	United Kingdom
8	9	10	8	University of California, Berkeley	United States
9	10	9	12	University of Chicago	United States
10	8	8	9	Imperial College London	United Kingdom
11	11	11	10	Yale University	United States
12	13	13	11	University of California, Los Angeles	United States
13	14	12	18	Columbia University	United States
14	12	15	15	Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich)	Switzerland
15	16	14	13	Johns Hopkins University	United States
16	15	16	19	University of Pennsylvania	United States
17	23	22	24	Duke University	United States
18	20	18	15	University of Michigan	United States
19	18	20	14	Cornell University	United States
20	21	19	17	University of Toronto	Canada
21	17	17	22	University College London	United Kingdom
22	19	26	25	Northwestern University	United States
23	27	30	26	University of Tokyo	Japan
24	22	21	20	Carnegie Mellon University	United States
25	24	25	23	University of Washington	United States
26	29	40	34	National University of Singapore	Singapore
27	25	29	--	University of Texas at Austin	United States
28	25	24	27	Georgia Institute of Technology	United States
29	33	31	33	University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign	United States
30	31	27	--	University of Wisconsin-Madison	United States
31	30	22	30	University of British Columbia	Canada
32	39	47	86	London School of Economics and Political Science	United Kingdom
33	35	35	29	University of California, Santa Barbara	United States
34	28	37	36	University of Melbourne	Australia
35	34	28	35	McGill University	Canada
36	42	32	43	Karolinska Institute	Sweden
37	40	46	48	Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)	Switzerland
38	57	56	77	King's College London	United Kingdom
39	32	36	40	University of Edinburgh	United Kingdom
40	41	44	60	New York University	United States
40	38	33	32	University of California, San Diego	United States
42	44	41	38	Washington University in St Louis	United States
43	35	34	21	The University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong
44	59	124	109	Seoul National University	South Korea
45	46	49	37	Peking University	China
46	47	42	52	University of Minnesota	United States
47	42	43	30	University of North Carolina Chapel Hill	United States
48	37	38	43	Australian National University	Australia
49	61	51	109	Pennsylvania State University	United States
50	54	54	59	Boston University	United States
50	52	71	58	Tsinghua University	China

• For the full list, see the official website.
• For the rankings before the year of 2010, see the articles about results of the THE-QS World University Rankings:

THE–QS World University Rankings, 2004

THE–QS World University Rankings, 2005

THE–QS World University Rankings, 2006

THE–QS World University Rankings, 2007

THE–QS World University Rankings, 2008

THE–QS World University Rankings, 2009

Rankings by subjects

Times has also provided rankings by subjects. Various academic disciplines are sorted into six categories which are "Arts & Humanities"; "Clinical, Pre-clinical & Health"; "Engineering & Technology"; "Life sciences"; "Physical sciences" and "Social sciences", each of which gives the positions of the top 100 tertiary institutions, according to the latest rankings.^[30]

Such rankings are released annually, along with the major overall rankings.

THE 100 under 50 universities

Times has provided rankings of THE 100 Under 50 universities since 2012 to judge the world's top 100 tertiary institutions that are under 50 years old. This ranking adopts the same 13 separate indicators as the World University Rankings but the weighting is different.^[31]

World Reputation Rankings

The graph shows the number of universities included in the TIMES Higher Education Top 100 2008, by region

Since March 2011, Times Higher Education has released an additional type of rankings called the "World Reputation Rankings"^[32] which are a subsidiary of the major world university rankings and rank the top 100 universities by reputation based on a global survey. Such reputation rankings are independent of the main rankings.

Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed said of the new rankings: "...Most outfits that do rankings get criticized for the relative weight given to reputation as opposed to objective measures. While Times Higher Education does overall rankings that combine various factors, it is today releasing rankings that can't be criticized for being unclear about the impact of reputation – as they are strictly of reputation."^[33]

There are totally 100 tertiary institutions on the annual list, the top 50 of which are shown as follows:

Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings — Top 50

2013[34]	2012[35]	2011[36]	Institute	Region
1	1	1	Harvard University	United States
2	2	2	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	United States
3	3	3	University of Cambridge	United Kingdom
4	6	6	University of Oxford	United Kingdom
5	5	4	University of California, Berkeley	United States
6	4	5	Stanford University	United States
7	7	7	Princeton University	United States
8	9	12	University of California, Los Angeles	United States
9	8	8	University of Tokyo	Japan
10	10	9	Yale University	United States
11	11	10	California Institute of Technology	United States
12	12	13	University of Michigan	United States
13	15	23	Columbia University	United States
14	14	15	University of Chicago	United States
14	13	11	Imperial College London	United Kingdom
16	16	17	University of Toronto	Canada
17	16	16	Cornell University	United States
18	19	22	University of Pennsylvania	United States
19	18	14	Johns Hopkins University	United States
20	22	24	Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich	Switzerland
20	21	19	University College London	United Kingdom
22	23	27	National University of Singapore	Singapore
23	20	18	Kyoto University	Japan
24	23	21	University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign	United States
25	29	37	London School of Economics and Political Science	United Kingdom
26	37	28	Carnegie Mellon University	United States
27	32	31	University of Texas at Austin	United States
27	28	26	University of Washington	United States
29	34	51-60	New York University	United States
30	27	--	University of Wisconsin-Madison	United States
31	25	31	University of British Columbia	Canada
31	33	36	Duke University	United States
31	25	29	McGill University	Canada
34	36	30	University of California, San Diego	United States
35	30	35	Tsinghua University	China
36	39	42	The University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong
37	35	40	Northwestern University	United States
38	41	39	Georgia Institute of Technology	United States
39	43	45	University of Melbourne	Australia
40	31	34	University of California, San Francisco	United States
41	51-60	51-60	Seoul National University	South Korea
42	44	51-60	Australian National University	Australia
42	39	19	University of Massachusetts	United States
44	42	48	Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München	Germany
45	38	43	Peking University	China
46	49	45	University of Edinburgh	United Kingdom
47	51-60	61-70	University of Manchester	United Kingdom
48	44	38	University of California, Davis	United States
49	50	51-60	University of Sydney	Australia
50	33	--	Lomonosov Moscow State University	Russia
50	47	47	Purdue University	United States

• For the full list, see the official website.

Regional rankings

Asia University Rankings

In April 2013, Times Higher Education released its first university rankings dedicated to the Asian higher education sector. However, unlike the QS Asian University Rankings whose methodologies are different from the QS World University Rankings, the Times Asia University Rankings use exactly the same criteria as its World University Rankings.

The Asia University Rankings judge world class universities across all of their core missions - teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook, and provide the positions of top 100 Asian tertiary institutes.^[37]

Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings — Top 50

2013	Institute	Region
1	University of Tokyo	Japan
2	National University of Singapore	Singapore
3	The University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong
4	Peking University	China
5	Pohang University of Science and Technology	South Korea
6	Tsinghua University	China
7	Kyoto University	Japan
8	Seoul National University	South Korea
9	Hong Kong University of Science and Technology	Hong Kong
10	Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology	South Korea
11	Nanyang Technological University	Singapore
12	Chinese University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong
13	Tokyo Institute of Technology	Japan
14	National Taiwan University	Taiwan
15	Hebrew University of Jerusalem	Israel
15	Tohoku University	Japan
17	Osaka University	Japan
18	Tel Aviv University	Israel
19	City University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong
20	Yonsei University	South Korea
21	Technion Israel Institute of Technology	Israel
22	Middle East Technical University	Turkey
23	Sungkyunkwan University	South Korea
24	Fudan University	China
25	University of Science and Technology of China	China
26	Nagoya University	Japan
27	National Tsing Hua University	Taiwan
28	Bilkent University	Turkey
28	Korea University	South Korea
30	Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	India
31	Koç University	Turkey
32	National Chiao Tung University	Taiwan
33	Hong Kong Polytechnic University	Hong Kong
33	Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay	India
35	Nanjing University	China
36	Tokyo Metropolitan University	Japan
37	Boğaziçi University	Turkey
38	Istanbul Technical University	Turkey
39	Tokyo Medical and Dental University	Japan
40	Shanghai Jiao Tong University	China
41	Renmin University of China	China
42	Sharif University of Technology	Iran
42	University of Tsukuba	Japan
44	Hokkaido University	Japan
45	Zhejiang University	China
46	National Sun Yat-Sen University	Taiwan
47	National Cheng Kung University	Taiwan
48	Kyushu University	Japan
49	King Abdulaziz University	Saudi Arabia
50	Hong Kong Baptist University	Hong Kong

• For the full list, see the official website.

Notes and references

External links

• Times Higher Education website
• Times Higher Education - Asia University Rankings
• The top 100 universities 2010 – how the Times Higher Education ranks them – The Guardian
• University rankings dominated by US, with Harvard top – BBC
• Interactive maps comparing the Times Higher Education, Academic Ranking of World Universities and QS World University Rankings

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