Draft:International University Rankings

International university rankings order universities in several countries based on factors that vary depending on the ranking. In addition to ranking entire institutions, specific programs, departments, and schools can be ranked. Different rankings use different indicators, such as institutional income, number of published scientific articles, reputation, or share of international students.

History
The first international university ranking, Academic Ranking of World Universities, of was released in 2003 by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. It was followed the year after by Times Higher Education's World University Rankings. In 2010, Times Higher Education (THE) made a major overhaul of their ranking, and as part of that change they ceased their cooperation with Quacquarelli Symmonds (QS). QS then chose to keep publishing the original ranking, under the name of QS World University Rankings. Several other rankings have been published since 2003, some just once, some a few times, and some annually.

Use
International university rankings are used in many ways.


 * Students use international university rankings to select institutions, although this is primarily true for international postgraduate students, and to some extent national postgraduate students. Undergraduate students usually rely on other sources of information.
 * Some organisations that provide scholarships for international studies require the destination university to be ranked above a certain threshold in one or more international university rankings.
 * Some countries use university rankings as part of points-based immigration programs - degrees from highly ranked universities give higher scores than other degrees.

Criticism
International university rankings have received severe criticism, on many levels. From a principal point of view, critics have argued that rankings can divert universities' attention away from teaching and social responsibility towards the type of scientific research valued by indicators used for ranking exercises. There have also been concerns that by applying a limited set of criteria to universities all over the world, and given the strong desire to rank highly, rankings actually encourage the homogenisation of higher education institutions, making them less responsive and less relevant to their immediate contexts. The fact that rankings are also said to favour the advantage already enjoyed by the most prestigious institutions has important implications for equity.

There is also fundamental criticism of the methodologies of international university rankings  , summarised here:

No consensus on what to measure
There is no consensus on what 'university quality' means. Universities have different tasks and perform a multitude of functions, and it is often hard to measure some or all of these functions. Also, if you measure several functions, how do you amalgamate them into a single ranking? In practice, most international university rankings measure research more or less exclusively.

English-language bias
Bibliometric databases are biased towards English-language research, and since most university rankings rely heavily on bibliometric databases, this bias applies to the rankings as well.

Bias towards science, engineering and medicine
Bibliometric databases are skewed to benefit institutions with a high proportion of research in natural sciences, engineering and medicine, and since most university rankings rely heavily on bibliometric databases, this bias applies to the rankings as well.

Nobel Prizes and other scientific awards
Awards do not reflect the current strength of universities since scientific awards often are given to researchers based on what they have done decades ago. Further, the awards are biased to a small number of countries, and they only cover a few academic fields.

Reputation surveys
Reputations surveys have low validity and very low response rates.

Small differences in score result in large differences in ranking position
Statistically insignificant differences in score still result in significantly different ranking positions.

No measures of teaching quality
There are no measures of teaching quality that can be applied internationally. Staff-to-student measures only reflects research intensity.

Academic Influence
Academic Influence creates global as well as US-centric rankings of colleges, universities, and disciplinary programs by evaluating the combined influence of a school's faculty within and across fields of study. Using machine-learning technology developed with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Academic Influence searches and collates open-source data from such massive publicly available data sources as Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crossref, Semantic Scholar, IPEDS, and  BLS. Academic Influence gives weight in its rankings to citations of peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and books by influential academics worldwide. It thereby attempts to map and measure the influence of a school's thought leadership through its students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Academic Influence allows users to create rankings on the fly, and filter by discipline, country, and period. Tech entrepreneur and computer scientist Erik J. Larson co-founded Academic Influence.

Academic Ranking of World Universities
The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) compiled originally by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and now maintained by the ShanghaiRanking Consultancy, has provided annual global rankings of universities since 2003, making it the earliest of its kind. ARWU does not rely on surveys and school submissions. Among other criteria, ARWU includes the number of articles published by Nature or Science and the number of Nobel Prize winners and Fields Medalists (mathematics).

Aggregate Ranking of Top Universities
The Aggregate Ranking of Top Universities (ARTU) is a meta-ranking that positions universities based on World University Rankings by THE, QS, and ARWU. ARTU is produced by UNSW Sydney and published annually since 2019, with retrospective rankings available for 2012 to 2018. In 2022, ARTU ranked 418 universities and featured the Top 400 for publication.

The criteria for ARTU is the sum of world rank across the 3 rankings (=THE+QS+ARWU) with universities excluded if they do not have a distinct rank in THE, QS, and ARWU. Since 2012, United States has the highest number of ARTU Top 200 universities, while Switzerland has the most ARTU Top 200 universities per capita.

Center for World University Rankings
The Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) is based in the United Arab Emirates and publishes international university rankings attempting to measure the quality of education and training for students as well as the prestige of the faculty members and the quality of their research. CWUR includes subject rankings in 227 categories. In the United States, the CWUR evaluates and ranks over 1,300 universities and 2,000 worldwide.

Eduniversal
This university ranking is owned by the French consulting company and rating agency SMBG. It ranks masters and MBA in its 9 geographical regions (the 5 continents).

European Research Ranking
This ranking is based on publicly available data from the European Commissions project and funding database CORDIS to estimate the funding and networking performance of European research institutions.

Human Resources & Labor Review
The Human Resources & Labor Review (HRLR) publishes a human competitiveness index & analysis annually by Asia First Media- now part of Destiny Media, previously ChaseCareer Network (ChaseCareer.Net). This system is based on Human Resources & Labour Review Indexes, the HRI and LRI, which measure the performance of top 300 universities' graduates.

Leiden Ranking
The Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University maintains a European and worldwide ranking of the top 500 universities according including the number and impact of Web of Science-indexed publications per year. Multiple ranking lists are released according to various bibliometric normalisation and impact indicators, including the number of publications, citations-per-publication, and field-averaged impact per publication.

Nature Index
The Nature Index tracks the affiliations of high-quality scientific articles published in 68 science journals independently chosen by the scientific community as the journals scientists would most like to publish their best research in. Updated monthly, the Nature Index presents research reports of approximately 9,000 parent institutions worldwide presenting a page of output statistics for each institution along with information on institutions collaborating with the institution in the publication of Index articles.

Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities
The Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities was produced until 2012 by the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT), and from then on it has been produced by National Taiwan University and is also known as the NTU ranking. The indicators were designed to measure both long-term and short-term research performance of research universities.

The ranking uses solely bibliometric indicators, and apart from the overall ranking of 500 top universities, NTU produces six broad field rankings and a number of more narrow subject rankings in science and technology.

Professional Ranking of World Universities
In contrast to academic rankings, the Professional Ranking of World Universities established in 2007 by the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris measures the efficiency of each university at producing leading business professionals. Its main compilation criterion is the number of Chief Executive Officers (or equivalent) among the Fortune Global 500.

QS World University Rankings
The QS World University Rankings are a ranking of the world's top universities produced by Quacquarelli Symonds published annually since 2004. In 2022, they ranked 1300 universities.

The QS rankings should not be confused with the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. From 2004 to 2009 the QS rankings were published in collaboration with Times Higher Education and were known as the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings. In 2010 QS assumed sole publication of rankings produced with this methodology when Times Higher Education split from QS in order to create a new rankings methodology in partnership with Thomson Reuters. The QS rankings were previously published in the United States by U.S. News & World Report as the "World's Best Universities". However, in 2014, U.S. News & World Report launched their own international university ranking titled "Best Global Universities". The inaugural ranking was published in October 2014.

Apart from the overall ranking, QS publishes a number of specialised rankings, such as Asian University Rankings, Latin American University Rankings, Top 50 under 50, graduate employment rankings, and 54 subject rankings.

QS Asian University Rankings In 2009, Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) launched a department of the QS Asian University Rankings in partnership with The Chosun Ilbo newspaper in Korea.

These rankings use some of the same criteria as the World University Rankings but they use other measures, such as incoming and outgoing exchange students as well. As the criteria and their weightings are different, the QS World university rankings and the QS Asian University rankings released in the same academic year are different. QS published global universities ranking by different major in different countries, which has special reference value for international students, like Statistics & Operational Research program in China.

QS Latin American University Rankings The QS Latin American University Rankings were launched in 2011. They use academic opinion (30 percent), employer opinion (20 percent), publications per faculty member, citations per paper, academic staff with a PhD, faculty/student ratio, and web visibility (10 percent each) as measures.

Reuters World's Top 100 Innovative Universities
The ranking uses ten different metrics. The criteria focused on academic papers, which indicate basic research performed at a university, and patent filings, which point to an institution's interest in protecting and commercialising its discoveries. Compiled by the Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters, the list uses proprietary data and analysis tools. The process cross-references the 500 academic and government organisations with the greatest number of published articles in scholarly journals as indexed in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science Core Collection database against how many patents and patent equivalents each organisation filed in the same period in the Derwent World Patents Index and the Derwent Innovations Index. The remaining 70 institutions were mostly universities and were ranked using criteria such as frequency of patent applications granted, the number of filed patents, frequency of those patents being cited, as well as how many of their papers were cited by patents or co-authored by an industry author. The ranking has the Asia-Pacific edition featuring top 75 institutions across the region and top 25 most innovative governmental institutions in the world.

Round University Ranking
Round University Ranking, abbreviated RUR Rankings, is a world university ranking assessing effectiveness of 750 leading universities in the world based on 20 indicators distributed among 4 key dimension areas: teaching, research, international diversity, financial sustainability. The ranking has international coverage and is intended to become a tool of choice of the university for the key stakeholders of higher education: applicants, students, representatives of the academic community, university management. The RUR Rankings publisher is an independent RUR Rankings Agency, geographically located in Moscow, Russia.

SCImago Institutions Rankings
The SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR) since 2009 has published its international ranking of worldwide research institutions, the SIR World Report. The SIR World Report is the work of the SCImago Research Group, a Spain-based research organisation consist of members from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), University of Granada, Charles III University of Madrid, University of Alcalá, University of Extremadura and other education institutions in Spain.

The ranking measures areas such as research output, international collaboration, normalised impact, and publication rate.

The Three University Missions
The Three University Missions Moscow International University Ranking (shortly MosIUR) is produced by Association of Rating Makers, a non-commercial organisation based in Moscow. The Three University Missions ranking evaluates the quality of education, scientific work, and the universities' contribution to society. The ranking uses 17 criteria divided into three groups: Education, Research, and University and Society.

The shortlist of the Moscow International University Ranking aims to provide the widest possible representation of the leading multi-profile universities all over the world, the quota being assigned to each country with regard to that country’s contribution to global economy. MosIUR shortlists those universities that achieved leading positions in other global university rankings and/or national academic rankings listed in IREG Inventory of National Rankings, and, in some cases, also those universities showing the highest research productivity. MosIUR does not consider narrow-focused higher education institutions. The latest Moscow Ranking issue featured 1800 higher education institutions globally.

Times Higher Education World University Rankings
From 2004 to 2009 Times Higher Education (THE), a British publication, published the annual Times Higher Education–QS World University Rankings in association with Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). THE published a table of the top 200 universities and QS ranked approximately 500 online, in book form, and via media partners. On 30 October 2009, THE broke with QS and joined Thomson Reuters to provide a new set of world university rankings, called Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

Research published by professors at the University of Michigan in 2011 demonstrated that the early THES rankings were disproportionately influential in establishing the status order of world research universities.

Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings. This ranking was published for the first time in March 2011. The rankings are based on a survey of (for 2016) 10,323 academics from 133 countries, who are asked to talk the top universities in their field for teaching and for research.

U-Multirank
U-Multirank, a European Commission supported feasibility study, was undertaken to contribute to the European Commission objective of enhancing transparency about the different missions and the performance of higher education institutions and research institutes. At a press conference in Brussels on 13 May 2011, the U-Multirank was officially launched by Androulla Vassiliou, Commissioner for Higher Education and Culture saying: U-Multirank "will be useful to each participating higher education institution, as a planning and self-mapping exercise. By providing students with clearer information to guide their study choices, this is a fresh tool for more quality, relevance and transparency in European higher education."

University Ranking by Academic Performance
The University Ranking by Academic Performance, abbreviated as URAP, was developed in the Informatics Institute of Middle East Technical University. Since 2010, it has been publishing annual national and global college and university rankings for top 2000 institutions. The scientometrics measurement of URAP is based on data obtained from the Institute for Scientific Information via Web of Science and inCites. For global rankings, URAP employs indicators of research performance including the number of articles, citation, total documents, article impact total, citation impact total, and international collaboration. In addition to global rankings, URAP publishes regional rankings for universities in Turkey using additional indicators such as the number of students and faculty members obtained from Center of Measuring, Selection and Placement ÖSYM.

U.S. News & World Report Best Global Universities Rankings
U.S. News & World Report inaugural Best Global Universities ranking was launched on 28 October 2014, and it was based on data and metrics provided by Thomson Reuters, and are thus methodologically different from the criteria traditionally used by U.S. News to rank American institutions. Universities are judged on factors such as global research reputation, publications, and the number of highly cited papers. U.S. News also publishes region-specific and subject-specific global rankings based on this methodology.

The annual U.S. News Best Global Universities rankings were produced to provide insight into how universities compare globally. As an increasing number of students are planning to enroll in universities outside of their own country, the Best Global Universities rankings – which focus specifically on schools' academic research and reputation overall and not on their separate undergraduate or graduate programs – can help those students accurately compare institutions around the world.

The Best Global Universities rankings also provide insight into how U.S. universities – which U.S. News has been ranking separately for more than 30 years – stand globally. All universities can now benchmark themselves against schools in their own country and region, become more visible on the world stage and find top schools in other countries to consider collaborating with.

University Ranking Organization
University Ranking Organization (UniversityRanking.Org), is a university ranking organisation founded by teachers and academic facilitators dedicated to providing unbiased rankings for Colleges/Universities worldwide. Universities are ranked based on a proprietary algorithm (reputation, research, facility, faculty etc.). The schools are ranked with their description and multimedia to facilitate school selection.

Webometrics
The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities is produced by Cybermetrics Lab (CCHS), a unit of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the main public research body in Spain. It offers information about more than 12,000 universities according to their web presence (an assessment of the scholarly contents, visibility, and impact of universities on the web). The ranking is updated every January and July.

The Webometrics Ranking or Ranking Web is built from a database of over 30,000 higher education institutions. The top 12,000 universities are shown in the main ranking and more are covered in regional lists.

The ranking started in 2004 and is based on a composite indicator that includes both the volume of the Web content and the visibility and impact of web publications according to the number of external links they received. A wide range of scientific activities appears exclusively on academic websites and is typically overlooked by bibliometric indicators.