London crowned world's leading university city

Notes to editors

NOTES TO EDITORS

QS University Rankings

QS Quacquarelli Symonds have been compiling university rankings since 2004, when they published their inaugural QS World University Rankings. Since then, QS’s rankings have grown to be the world’s most popular source of comparative data about university performance. Their Subject rankings tables were visited over 37 million times in 2018, and their overall rankings tables over 73 million times.

The project has expanded to include: 5 regional rankings, the QS Best Student Cities ranking, rankings by Subject Area, the QS Higher Education System Strength Ranking, and, most recently, the QS Graduate Employability Ranking. QS’s research is featured by media outlets across the world, with over 50,000 media clippings related to QS published in 2018.

Method

¹QS use four key metrics to compile the rankings. The precise weighting of each metric varies by subject to reflect differing publication cultures across disciplines. For example, research performance is deemed to be a stronger indicator of institutional strength in Medicine, where the discipline is highly reliant on dissemination of research, than it is in Performing Arts, where the discipline is more vocational in nature.

1. Academic Reputation – which institutions are most-highly regarded by the global academic community? The scores for this indicator are based on over 94,000 responses to QS’s Academic Survey – the world’s largest repository of global academic sentiment;

2. Employer Reputation – which institutions are regarded by the world’s hiring managers as nurturing the most talented, hireable graduates? The dataset for this indicator is derived from insights offered by over 44,000 hiring managers – the world’s largest repository of informed employer opinion about graduate strength;

3. Citations per Paper – which institutions are having the strongest impact on research in their field? This indicator accounts for the distribution of 162 million research citations deriving from 22.5 million research papers, indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database. To account for divergences in institutional size, QS do not measure raw citation counts – which favours larger institutions – but divide the number of citations received on an institution’s research papers by the number of papers produced across a five-year window.

4. H-Index – how productive are an institution’s research faculty? The h-index is a way of measuring both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar. The index is based on the set of the academic’s most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications.

About Scopus Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and features tools to track, analyze and visualize scholarly research. Its comprehensive database contains 55+ million items indexed from 21,000 titles from more than 5,000 publishers worldwide, ensuring broad interdisciplinary coverage in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities. Scopus was designed and developed with input from researchers and librarians and features direct links to subscribed full-text articles, other library resources and interoperability with applications such as reference management software. Scopus is part of the Elsevier Research Intelligence portfolio which includes the SciVal tools, the Pure system, rich data assets and custom Analytical Services.

About Elsevier Elsevier is a world-leading provider of information solutions that enhance the performance of science, health, and technology professionals, empowering them to make better decisions, deliver better care, and sometimes make groundbreaking discoveries that advance the boundaries of knowledge and human progress. Elsevier provides web-based, digital solutions — among them ScienceDirect, Scopus, Elsevier Research Intelligence and ClinicalKey — and publishes over 2,500 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and more than 33,000 book titles, including a number of iconic reference works. Elsevier is part of RELX Group plc, a world-leading provider of information solutions for professional customers across industries.

To see the full rankings please visit www.TopUniversities.com

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