QS World University Rankings
The QS World University Rankings are a ranking of the world’s top universities produced by Quacquarelli Symonds and published annually since 2004. In 2011 they ranked 712 universities, with the University of Cambridge in the UK, Harvard University in the USA and MIT on top. The QS rankings should not be confused with the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. From 2004 to 2009 the QS rankings were published in collaboration with Times Higher Education and were known as the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings. In 2010 QS assumed sole publication of rankings produced with this methodology when Times Higher Education split from QS in order to create a new rankings methodology in partnership with Thomson Reuters. The QS rankings are published in the United States by US News & World Report as the "World's Best Universities."
The QS rankings use peer review data collected (in 2011) from 33,744 scholars and academics and 16,785 recruiters. These two are worth 40 per cent and 10 per cent of a university's possible score respectively. The QS rankings also incorporate citation per faculty member data from Scopus, faculty/student ratios, and international staff and student numbers. The citations and faculty/student measures are worth 20 per cent of an institution's total possible score and the international staff and student data five per cent each. QS has published online material about its methodology.
QS published the 2011 QS World University Rankings online on September 6, 2011. The rankings also appear in book form, and via media partners including US News & World Report and The Chosun Ilbo.
QS has added to its main World University Rankings, starting in 2009 with the Asian University Rankings. The QS Latin American University Rankings and the QS World University Rankings by Subject were published for the first time in 2011.
The subject rankings are intended to address the most frequent criticism of all world university ranking systems, that they contain too little material about specific subjects, something potential applicants are keen to see. These rankings have been drawn up on the basis of citations, academic peer review and recruiter review, with the weightings for each dependent upon the culture and practice of the subject concerned. They are published in five clusters; engineering; biomedicine; the natural sciences; the social sciences; and the arts and humanities, and cover 29 subjects in 2012.
Read more about this topic: College And University Rankings, Global Rankings
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