World's Best Universities: Citations per Faculty Member

U.S.News & World Report's World's Best Universities rankings, based on the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings, identified these to be world's top universities in 2009.

Schools by Location The Top 200 Asian and Middle Eastern Australian and New Zealand British and European Canadian Schools by Subject The Top 200 Arts and Humanities Engineering and IT Life Sciences and Biomedicine Natural & Physical Sciences Social Sciences Methodologies World's Best Universities Methodology Subject Area Rankings Methodology Academic Peer Review Citations per Faculty Member Student-to-Faculty Ratio Employer Review Survey International Student and International Faculty Factors Weightings and Statistical Scores About the World's Best Universities Rankings

How are citations per faculty member evaluated for the 2009 U.S. News World's Best Universities rankings, which are based on data from the THE-QS World University Rankings produced in association with QS Quacquarelli Symonds?

Citations per faculty, when evaluated to account for the size of the institution, are the best understood and most widely accepted measure of research strength and faculty productivity at a university. The number of citations per faculty member also is one of the few factors that can be used to compare institutions across borders. Data on citations can be analyzed to determine the popularity and impact of specific articles, authors, and publications and therefore the institution itself. Instead of a "per paper" basis, the U.S. News World's Best Universities ranking has adopted a "per faculty member" approach. The citations score contributes 20 percent to the overall rankings score.

For the calculation of this indicator, QS gathers two distinct data sets:

Total citation count for the past five years. There are three major sources of publications and citation data worldwide. They are the Web of Science from Thomson Reuters, Scopus from Elsevier, and Google Scholar. In 2007, QS made the switch to Scopus for a number of reasons but principally because of its broader journal coverage, which leads to results for a larger number of institutions. The 2009 citation counts are based on a version of Scopus dated June 26, 2009. Scopus is a rapidly evolving system; data included in the U.S. News World's Best Universities rankings may differ significantly from the current content of Scopus online.

Full-time-equivalent faculty. Faculty numbers used are totals. While it would be ideal to separate the notions of teaching and research faculties and use the former for calculating the student-faculty ratio and the latter for this indicator, it has not been possible to do so because data that specific have been unavailable for many countries in the study. The definition of exactly what data we request has evolved gradually over the years to minimize ambiguity.