The regional ranking uses five basic criteria: research impact and productivity, teaching commitment, employability, web impact and, for the first time in 2016, internationalization. The method retains key indicators of the global ranking, such as Academic Reputation, Employer Reputation, and Faculty/Student Ratio, though each has a different weighting in this regional study.
The methodology differs somewhat from that used for either the QS World University Rankings® or the QS University Rankings: Asia, based on feedback collected from the region, the expert assessment of important factors in the region and the availability of data.
The research excellence element, that exist in all of our regional rankings, is based on data from Scopus, the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed academic literature.