QS Latin America University Rankings Methodology

The regional ranking uses five basic criteria: research impact and productivity, teaching commitment, employability, online impact and internationalisation. The method retains key indicators of the global ranking, such as Academic Reputation, Employer Reputation, and Faculty to Student Ratio, but also considers a set of performance metrics carefully tailored for the region. The following metrics are used:   

Academic reputation (30%) 

Taken from the annual survey conducted by QS designed to evaluate the perceptions of academics from around the world regarding teaching and research quality at the best universities. In doing so, it has grown to become the world’s largest survey of academic opinion, and, in terms of size and scope, is an unparallel means of measuring sentiment in the academic community. This year, over 130,000 responses were recorded globally. 

Employer reputation (20%) 

The Employer Reputation metric is based on responses to the QS Employer Survey, and asks employers to identify those institutions from which they source the most competent, innovative, effective graduates. The QS Employer Survey is also the world’s largest of its kind. 

Faculty to student ratio (10%) 

This is the ratio between the number of academic staff and number of students. A higher number of teachers per student is an indirect indicator of the commitment of the institutions to high-quality teaching. 

Staff with PhD (10%) 

This indicator attempts to assess the quality of training of the academic staff, detecting the proportion of them that have reached the highest level of education in their area of expertise. 

This is an indirect measure of the commitment of universities to high-quality teaching and research. 

International research network (10%) 

Using data provided by Scopus, this indicator assesses the degree of international openness in terms of research collaboration for each evaluated institution. To calculate this indicator the Margalef Index, widely used in the environmental sciences, has been adapted to produce a score that gives an indication of the diversity of an institution’s research collaborations with other institutions in different locations of the world. 

Citations per paper (10%) 

This ratio measures the average number of citations obtained per publication, and is an estimate of the impact and quality of the scientific work done by universities. Data indexed by Scopus is also used. To avoid anomalous results, only the institutions producing more than 100 papers in the last five years are evaluated. 

The paper and citation counts are normalised, ensuring that citations achieved in each of the five broad faculty areas are weighted equally. 

Papers per faculty (5%) 

This indicator seeks to determine the average number of scientific publications (papers) produced per faculty and evaluates the research productivity of the institutions. The data is provided by Elsevier Scopus. The paper count is normalised, ensuring that citations achieved in each of the five broad faculty areas are weighted equally. 

Web impact (5%) 

This indicator assesses the effectiveness with which institutions are making use of new technologies. Baseline information is provided by the Ranking Web of Universities (www.webometrics.info), although the results are refactored to exclude the Excellence indicator, which is already considered in the metrics related to scientific research.