Times Higher Education World University Rankings
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings, often referred to as the THE Rankings, is the annual publication of university rankings by the Times Higher Education magazine. The publisher had collaborated with Quacquarelli Symonds to publish the joint THE-QS World University Rankings from 2004 to 2009 before it turned to Thomson Reuters for a new ranking system from 2010 to 2013. In 2014, the magazine signed an agreement with Elsevier to provide it with the data used in compiling its annual rankings.
The publication includes global rankings of universities, including by subject and reputation. It also has begun publishing three regional tables for universities in Asia, Latin America, and BRICS and emerging economies, which are ranked with separate criteria and weightings.
The THE Rankings is often considered one of the most widely observed university rankings together with the Academic Ranking of World Universities and the QS World University Rankings. It is praised for having a new, improved ranking methodology since 2010, but criticism and concerns have been voiced that this methodology underestimates non-science and non-English instructing institutions and relies on a subjective reputation survey.
History
The creation of the original Times Higher Education–QS World University Rankings has been attributed to John O'Leary, a former editor of Times Higher Education. 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.
Commenting on Times Higher Educations 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."
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."
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." THE published its first rankings using its new methodology on 16 September 2010, a month earlier than previous years.
In 2010, Times Higher Education World University Rankings, along with the QS World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities, were described to be the three most influential international university rankings. The Globe and Mail in that year also described the Times Higher Education World University Rankings to be "arguably the most influential."
In 2014 Times Higher Education announced a series of important changes to its flagship THE World University Rankings and its suite of global university performance analyses, following a strategic review by THE parent company TES Global.
Methodology
Criteria and weighting
The inaugural 2010–2011 methodology contained 13 separate indicators grouped under five categories: Teaching, research, citations , international mix, industry income. The number of indicators is up from the Times-QS rankings published between 2004 and 2009, which used six indicators.A draft of the inaugural 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", "institutional indicators", "economic activity/innovation", and "international diversity". The names of the categories and the weighting of each was modified in the final methodology, released on 16 September 2010 The final methodology also included the weighting assigned to each of the 13 indicators, shown below :
| Overall indicator | Individual indicator | Percentage weighting |
| Industry Income – innovation |
| |
| International diversity | ||
| Teaching – the learning environment | ||
| Research – volume, income and reputation | ||
| Citations – research influence |
The reputational component of the rankings came from an Academic Reputation Survey conducted by Thomson Reuters in spring 2010. The survey gathered 13,388 responses among scholars who, according to THE, were "statistically representative of global higher education's geographical and subject mix." However, the response rate of the survey in 2022-2024 was a mere 1.8%. 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.
Data for citation impact, comprising 32.5 per cent of the overall score, came from 12,000 academic journals indexed by Thomson Reuters' 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. 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.
The magazine announced on 5 September 2011 that its 2011–2012 World University Rankings would be published on 6 October 2011. 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 per cent of the overall score, and industry income will remain at 2.5 per cent. However, a new "international outlook – staff, students and research" will be introduced and will make up 7.5 per cent of the final score. This category will include the proportion of international staff and students at each institution, 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.
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 per cent of the world's universities in a recognition that "not every university should aspire to be one of the global research elite." However, the 2015/16 edition of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings ranks 800 universities, while Phil Baty announced that the 2016/17 edition, to be released on 21 September 2016, will rank "980 universities from 79 countries".
The methodology of the rankings was changed during the 2011–12 rankings process, with details of the changed methodology here. 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. 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. However, this claim is no longer true. In 2015, QS introduced faculty area normalization to their QS World University Rankings, ensuring that citations data was weighted in a way that prevented universities specializing in the Life Sciences and Engineering from receiving undue advantage.
In November 2014, the magazine announced further reforms to the methodology after a review by parent company TES Global. The major change being all institutional data collection would be bought in house severing the connection with Thomson Reuters. In addition, research publication data would now be sourced from Elsevier's Scopus database.