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Selection of the initial list
One of the most frequently asked questions we receive regarding the THES - QS World University Rankings is how we came up with the intitial list of 500+ institutions
The Peer Review and Recruiter Review constitute 50% of the weighting used to calculate the THES - QS World University Rankings and are both based on online surveys. In both cases respondents are asked to select up to 30 institutions they consider to be excellent in their area(s) of knowledge.
There are well in excess of 10,000 institutions of higher learning in the world. In fact our recent mission to the Asia Pacific region has revealed that there are over 18,000 post-secondary colleges in India alone, 700+ universities in Japan and over 1,400 institutions of higher learning in the Philippines. To ask a respondent to select from such a large number - even if we could compile a comrehensice list - would result in fewer responses and a large number of responses descending into impatience. So in order to make the user interface manageable it was important to restrict our exercise to a finite list of institutions.
So, how do we go about doing that?
Top 500 Institutions by Research Impact
We began in 2004, with a list of the world's top 500 institutions by research impact. That is to say, citations per paper as indexed by the Thomson ISI database.
Exclusion of single-faculty and postgraduate-only institutions
Initially, it was concluded that comparing single-faculty and postgraduate-only institutions to comprehensive universities would be unfair. These institutions would have a strong advantage in research led factors due to their more specific focuses. However, we are now investigating how we might re-include these institutions in their appropriate categories.
Human Review of the List
There are various countries that have strong universities but were not listed appropriately due, perhaps, to a lack of research publications in English, QS and THES experts reviewed the list in an attempt to balance these anomalies. Amongst others a number of German institutions were added. In addition, we felt it important, in a case where only a single institution from a country appeared, to add at least one or teo others from that country to enable ourselves to take some sort of local benchmark of our eventual results.
Inclusion of Asiaweek 2000 Ranked Institutions
In 2004, we received some criticism that a disproportionately small number of Asia Pacific institutions were included in our list. In an effort to correct this situation and to find the most appropriate additional universities to include we discovered the final results of the Asiaweek Rankings that finished in 2000 and ensured that all of the top universities listed there were included in our initial list.
Annual Review of the List
In the course of each year we receive a number of enquiries from institutions that have been omitted or are not included in the list asking how they can be included. We invite these institutions to make a case to us for inclusion... usually based on domestic rankings or other measures that portray their institution in a positive light relative to other institutions already included in our list. In preparation for the 2007 rankings we already have in the region of 10 institutions to be added to the list. We will also examine the survey response rates and if there are institutions receiving absolutely no responses we will considering removing them.
University Rankings
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