World's Best Universities: Methodology

Student-to-Faculty Ratio
Faculty-student ratio is used in many ranking systems and evaluations in the world. While it may not be a perfect measure of teaching quality, it is the most globally available and accessible measure of commitment to teaching. The ratio is an indicator to determine whether a given institution has sufficient staff to teach its students.

Citations per Faculty Member
Citations are a widely used conventional measure of research strength. A citation is a reference to one academic publication in the text of another. The more citations a publication receives, the better it is perceived to be, and the more highly cited papers a university publishes, the stronger it can be considered to be. As a measure, this criterion is somewhat geared toward scientific and technical subjects, which is the reason it doesn't carry more weight in these rankings. The source used in this evaluation is Scopus, the world's largest abstract and citation database of research literature. The latest five complete years of data are used. The total citation count is factored against the number of faculty members in order to take into account the size of the institution.

International Factors
In today's increasingly global marketplace, the most successful universities have to attract the world's best students and faculty from countries other than their own. Simple evaluations of the proportion of international students and the proportion of international faculty members serve as two separate indicators of an institution's international attractiveness.