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2008 Academic Peer Review Response Analysis

By: Ben Sowter

The Academic Peer Review currently forms 40% of the weightings applied by Times Higher Education to the various indicators included in the THE - QS World University Rankings. The final scores are compiled based on three years worth of responses from academics around the world to an online survey.

The total number of respondents considered for the 2008 results (including those that from 2007 and 2006 who have not updated their responses) was 6,354. Unless otherwise stated the analyses on this page refer to the entire Academic Peer Review sample.

Early in the peer review survey, respondents are asked to identify their broad faculty area of knowledge from five areas. Respondents are able to nominate more than one faculty area and as a result the total adds up to more than 100%. 

We also ask respondents to identify narrower subject specialisations. We will be running some more detailed analysis on these response over the coming months in order to enable us to release ranked tables in more specific disciplines beginning in Spring 2009. Watch this space.

Respondents are also asked to identify their knowledge by region. The list of institutions from which they can select within each subject area is influenced by their response to this question. Again, respondents are permitted to identify more than one region of knowledge.

Please note that the regions are listed in the survey as above, but with narrower subheadings. Respondents can select either individual component regions, or the larger region - or even both but when grouped together into the three broader regions for application of the weightings and such, their response is only counted once. As our response levels increase over the years a more sophisticated weighting involving this more detailed data may be appropriate. Cross-referencing these two questions yields the following breakdown by both region and subject area:

Questions have been raised in the past, regarding the level of seniority of our Academic Peer Review respondents. Since the outset of the survey in 2004 respondents have been asked to supply their job title as a way to be certain of the appropriateness of respondents. These data, however, would require a great deal of manual aggregation to deliver any meaningful analysis. As a result, in 2008 a "Job Classification" question was added to the survey where respondents are asked to categorise their job under a fixed number of classifications. The following chart demonstrates the breakdown.

Academic Peer Review Responses by Job Classification

Source: Academic Peer Review: 2008 Response Only Copyright © 2008 QS Intelligence Unit

There has also been much interest as to the precise location of responding peers. Regional weightings are based on the individual knowledge specification above, but in most cases these will reflect the geographical location (and experience) of respondents as detaile below.

NOTE: Data on this page does not all relate to the same sample - some relates to the entire sample (from 3 years) considered for the 2008 Academic Peer Review, whereas some refers only to the survey responses received in 2008. Please refer carefully to the source information.

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