Rating universities on research: QS Stars

Research quality is a key criterion in many university ranking and rating systems.

In traditional university rankings, such as the QS World University Rankings, criteria relating to research quality often carry the most weight. QS Stars has a rating focused purely on research.

If you are looking for a university that is academically ahead of the pack, with a strong reputation across a wide range of subject areas and a high output of ground-breaking work, then this is a QS Stars rating that you should pay close attention to.

To measure how good a university’s research quality is, QS Stars breaks it down into four areas:

Papers per faculty

The number of papers published by an institution’s faculty indexed on Scopus™ in a recent five-year period as per the latest QS World University Rankings serves as a useful measure of its productivity. The best universities are fast-paced, dynamic environments which produce a great deal of important work across a wide range of disciplines, so the higher this number is, the better.

Citations per paper

A good way of measuring the significance of the work being done at any given university is to measure how many times it is cited in the papers indexed on Scopus™ in a recent six-year period as per the latest QS World University Rankings. The more ground-breaking it is, the more other experts will refer to it, using it as the new base from which further progress will be made.

Research funds

QS Stars looks at both the amount of funding an institution secures for their research projects, and also their investment from their own funds to facilitate research projects out of their total turnover during the fiscal year. This includes monetary funds that constitute as research grants awarded towards research projects.

Academic reputation

If you want to know how good something is, it’s logical that you ask for the opinions of the experts, and that is exactly what this criterion measures. Full points are awarded to institutions with 200 academic nominations received from the latest QS Global Academic Reputation Survey analysis. The survey is sent to many thousands of global academics each year.

QS Stars does the evaluating for you, so you can easily see where a university’s strengths are in order to find a programme that suits your priorities. Take a look at which universities have achieved a high QS Stars rating for their research.