Bibliometrics - Papers per Faculty & Citations per Paper

Citations, evaluated in some fashion to take into account the size of institution, are the best understood and most widely accepted measure of research strength. The THE ‐ QS World University Rankings has adopted a "per faculty member" approach since its inception in 2004.

For the QS.com Asian University Rankings an alternate direction has been taken in order to address the regional context – here we are trying to address both productivity AND quality – and the area has been split into two indicators: papers per faculty member and citations per paper.

For the calculation of these indicators, QS gathers three factors from two distinct datasets:

1. Total citation and paper counts for a five year period (2003‐2007)
   There are three major sources of publication and citation data worldwide, these are the Web of Science from Thomson Reuters; Scopus from Elsevier and Google Scholar. The QS.com Asian University Rankings utilise Scopus, principally due to broader journal coverage leading to results for a larger number of institutions.
2. Full Time Equivalent (FTE) faculty
   Faculty numbers used are totals... whilst it would be ideal to separate the notions of teaching and research and use the former for calculating the Student Faculty Ratio and the latter for this indicator, it has not been possible to do so as data to that degree of distinction has so far proved unavailable for many countries in the study. The definition of exactly what data we request has evolved gradually over the years to minimize ambiguity. 2009 AUR citation and paper counts are based on a version of Scopus dated 23rd June 2008. In the future it will be the intention to bring the Scopus data processing work earlier in the annual cycle so that these regional rankings can benefit from more recent data.

Scopus is a rapidly evolving system; data included in the data analyzed for this exercise may differ significantly from the current content of Scopus online.

Bibliometric data tends to hand a clear advantage to institutions with strengths in scientific and technical fields. At time of writing, Scopus is working to add more books to its index, which ought to help in less scientific fields.