Frequently Asked Questions
1. Why are we doing the ranking?
Many students, faculties, institutions, governments and the public in general are interested in rankings of universities for different purposes. However, there is no ranking of world universities using multiple criteria. We hope our academic ranking will help you to compare and identify universities worldwide by their academic or research performance.
2. Is our academic ranking objective?
Any ranking is controversial and no ranking is absolutely objective. People should be cautious about any ranking including our Academic Ranking of World Universities. Nevertheless, our Academic Ranking is based on internationally comparable data that everyone could check.
3. Why are we doing academic ranking instead of comprehensive ranking?
The quality of universities cannot be precisely measured by mere numbers. It would be impossible to have a comprehensive ranking of universities worldwide, because of the huge differences of universities in the large variety of countries and the technical difficulties in obtaining internationally comparable data.
4. How many universities have we scanned?
We have scanned every university that has any Nobel Laureates, Highly Cited Researchers, or papers published in Nature or Science. In addition, we scanned major universities of every country with significant amount of papers cited by SCIE and SSCI. In total, we have collected data on about 2000 universities.
5. Why do we count only Nobel Laureates at the time of winning?
In our academic ranking, we did not count the number of Nobel Laureates who are alumni or current faculty members of universities, since it is technically difficult to obtain accurate data. Instead, we count only the number of Nobel laureates by their affiliation at the time of winning the prize. However, we are trying to obtain the number of alumni of universities who won Nobel prizes.
6. Why other international awards are not included?
In addition to Nobel Prizes, there are other well-known international awards in various subjects, such as Fields Medal in mathematics. However, it's extremely difficult for us to select, because it's always going to be controversial about any selection. Nobel Prize is the least controversial one.
7. Why some medical schools or health science centers are listed as separate institutions?
Some of the medical schools or health science centers in the multi-campus university systems of USA are listed as separate institutions according to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.
8. Why institutions specialized in humanities and social sciences have low ranks?
We tried really hard but were not successful in finding special criteria and internationally comparable data for social sciences and humanities. Many well-known institutions specialized in humanities and social sciences are missing from our list, or their ranks are relatively low. Nevertheless, if a university specialized in social sciences and humanities had Nobel Laureates in economics and Highly Cited Researchers in social sciences, it should have good standing in our academic ranking.
9. Are we going to rank world universities by disciplines?
No! We are not going to rank world universities by disciplines or programs.
