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Methodology: The Peer Review
As the "centrepiece" of the THES - QS World University Rankings the Peer Review is the inspiration for a lot of questions.
In the 2006 THES - QS World University Rankings the Peer Review Score was based on the responses of 3,703 academics around the world. The most common question we receive on this matter is "How do you identify these peers".
Firstly it is important to understand that the Peer Review operates on a three year "latest response" model. That is to say that the respondents are those that have replied in the last three years but if an respondent comes back and replies again - updating their opinion - their previous response is discarded. The 2006 Peer Review was the first where we have had the full three years of response.
So, each year, phase one of the peer review exercise is to invite all previous reviewers to return and update their opinion. Then we purchase two databases, one of 180,000 international academics from the World Scientific (based in Singapore) and another of around 12,000 from Mardev - focused mainly on Arts & humanities which is poorly represented in the former.
We examine the responses carefully and discard any test responses and bad responses and look for any non-academic responses that may have crept in.
The survey
The structure of the survey has changed little in three years and the provisional survey is available for review here.
Essentially the beginning of the survey allows the respondent to identify both themselves and their sphere of knowledge... the remainder of the survey is dynamic dependent on the early responses. Each respondent is given the opportunity to answer a question on research quality for each of the five broad subject areas in which we operate depending on whether or not they express knowledge within that area. These are:
- Arts & Humanities
- Engineering & IT
- Life Sciences & Biomedicine
- Natural Sciences
- Social Sciences
The list of institutions from which they are asked to select up to 30 they consider excellent in their subject area(s) of knowledge is dependent on the region(s) with which they claim familiarity.
Weighting
The response we have received to date is growing increasingly geographically even in its breakdown, but we apply a small weighting to balance the responses geographically between the following three "super" regions:
- Americas
- Europe, Middle East & Africa
- Asia Pacific
The Overall Score
The overall score is based on a combination of the peer review scores for the five individual subject areas... and as a result carries an equal weighting by both subject area and geography.
The Actual Response Breakdown
The actual breakdown by region, subject and country will be posted for each year of the Peer Review shortly and will be found under the results section for the given year.
University Rankings
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