Papers and Citations – Methodology
World
Citations per Faculty: 20%
Asia
Citations per Paper: 15%
Papers per Faculty: 15%
Latin America
Citations per Paper: 10%
Papers per Faculty: 10%
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.
