2. Is our academic ranking objective?

    The quality of universities cannot be precisely measured by mere numbers. Therefore, any ranking is controversial and no ranking is absolutely objective. People should be cautious about any ranking including our Academic Ranking of World Universities.

    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.

    We choose to rank universities worldwide by their academic or research performance. Furthermore, our Academic Ranking is based on internationally comparable data that everyone could check.

3. What are the major changes in our ranking of 2004?

    After analyzing the numerous comments and suggestions from all over the world, we make three major modifications.

    First of all, a new criterion is introduced for the quality of education. For the time being, it's measured by the number of the alumni of an institution winning Nobel prizes and Fields Medals. Please note that alumni are defined as those who obtain bachelor, Master's or doctoral degrees.

    Secondly, in addition to Nobel laureates, Fields Medal winners are also considered. The number of the staff of an institution winning Fields Medals in Mathematics is counted. Staff is defined as those who work at an institution at the time of winning the medal.

    Thirdly, the weight of the size indicator is reduced by 10% due to limited information, while the weight of the new indicator Alumni, for quality of education, is set at 10%.

4. How many universities have we ranked?

    We have scanned every university that has any Nobel Laureates, Fields Medals, 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 scanned more than two thousand universities.

    Although we publish only the top 500 universities, we have actually ranked one thousand universities. We regret that we will not be able to provide you with information on the ranking of universities beyond the top 500.

5. Why are some medical schools listed as independent institutions?

    Some of the medical schools or health science centers in the multi-campus university systems of USA are listed as independent 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.

6. Why do institutions specialized in social sciences have lower 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.
    In our ranking of 2004, the indicator of N&S is not considered for institutions specialized in humanities and social sciences such as London School of Economics, its weight is relocated to other indicators.

    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.


7. What are we planning to do next?

    We will listen to your opinions carefully and modify our ranking next summer again. Your suggestions will be very much appreciated!

    We are studying on the classification of universities. We hope to provide you with the list of top universities with engineering (technology) or medical orientation, extracted from the list of top 500 world universities.

    For the time being, we have no plans of ranking world universities by subjects, disciplines or programs. Nevertheless, we are interested in doing research on the topic.