| 10% | 10% |
Citations, evaluated in some fashion to take into account the size of institution, are the best understood and most widely accepted measure of research strength.
Often calculated on a “per paper” basis, the QS World University Rankings® has adopted a “per faculty member” approach since its inception in 2004. The Citations per Faculty score contributes 20% to the overall rankings score.
However, when devising new methodologies for the regional rankings the matter of language becomes a more important consideration. At a global level, the focus is on institutions that are contributing to knowledge and science at a global scale – publishing in English is an essential part of collaborative academic progress globally.
Part of the intention behind the deeper regional exercises is to evaluate a larger number of institutions – not only those contributing globally, but those who are important regionally, nationally and within their local communities – where publishing in English is not a pre-requisite in the same way.
These two indicators, each in their own way serve to be a little more rewarding to institutions that may publish a significant proportion of their research in other languages.
Papers per Faculty looks at publication volume within SciVerse Scopus regardless of language (Scopus accepts non-English content as long as there are English language abstracts).
Citations per Paper focuses on the performance of the papers an institution produces that are actually indexed in Scopus – ignoring efforts undertaken resulting in publication in local language journals that may not be covered by Scopus. A publication threshold of 100 papers is applied to eliminate anomalous low numbers of papers from overly benefiting small institutions.
1. The “per faculty member” approach is very good but, how do you count the faculty members?, do you count only de FTP (full time professors), or de FTE (full time equivalent), or just de total faculty members (full time and part time)?
2. What does a 100 score means in the citations by paper and the papers per faculty categories?
3. My university got a 41.3 score in papers per faculty, but none in citations by paper, does this means that the papers got no citations (or very few of them)?
1. We use Full Time Equivalent for all our personnel metrics
2. A score of 100 means the institution has the maximum normalized performance in that indicator
3. We only publish indicator scores for the top 300. Furthermore, an institution must publish at least 100 papers in five years to qualify for the citations per paper indicator. Although with a 41.3 in papers per faculty this cannot have taken effect here.