World Rankings

About the National Taiwan University Ranking (NTU)

The National Taiwan University Ranking (NTU) rankings first appeared in 2007. The ranking methodology has been relatively consistent since 2008 and is heavily reliant upon research output (Web of Science indexed articles).

NTU Ranking for UWA.

Performance Indicators

Within the NTU ranking there is no normalisation of citation data, which boosts the results of universities focused on medical and physical sciences, due to publication practices in those fields.

Staff size is not taken into account in the ranking (although the NTU team does provide a separate score for each university which has been adjusted for size).

Weighting of Performance Indicators. Note: The timeframe of the three long-term indicators is consistent with that in ESI, providing cumulative data for the last 11 years.

Subject Rankings

The NTU Rankings have also expanded to include rankings by broad fields and specific subject areas for the top 300 universities in the world.

About the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)

The ARWU first appeared in 2003. Although there have been some changes in the criteria used to rank universities, the ranking methodology has been fairly consistent since 2005.

ARWU World Ranking for UWA.

Performance Indicators

While the ARWU provides a list of the top 500 universities world wide, only the top 100 are provided with a ranked position. The remaining institutions are ranked in bands of either 50 or 100.

However, as the ARWU provides a score for each indicator for all 500 universities, we are able to determine the ranked position of all institutions to a high degree of accuracy.

Please refer to the ARWU website for information on the methodology.

Weighting of performance indicators.

Subject Rankings

Subjects UWA ranked in the top 100.

About QS Ranking

The QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) Ranking was introduced in 2005 and was conducted in conjunction with the Times Higher Education magazine until 2009.

QS World Ranking for UWA.

Performance Indicators

Subject Rankings

QS employ an different set of measures for their subject rankings, which list the top 200 universities in a given field. Each of the 54 subjects (across five broad areas) has different weightings applied to four factors:

Academic reputation:

Data are pulled on a per-subject basis from the survey employed in the main ranking.

Employer reputation:

Data are pulled on a per-subject basis from the survey employed in the main ranking.

Citations per paper:

Data are extracted from Scopus, and are calculated across a five year window (2010 to 2014 for the 2016 ranking)

H-Index:

Two h-indices are calculated; one for all the papers that are attributable to the given subject (h1), and one to the papers that are only attributable to that subject (h2). These are aggregated with double weight given to h2.

About the Times Higher Education Ranking (THE)

The THE Ranking was introduced in 2005. Until 2009, Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) ran the rankings for the THE. The 2010 THE ranking had a new set of criteria and relied on information gathered from Thomson Reuters, as well as survey data and institutional statistics. The 2015 THE ranking moved from using Thomson Reuters to Scopus for the provision of data.

Time Higher Education World Ranking for UWA.

Performance Indicators

There has been some tweaking of the indictors since the introduction of the ranking in 2010 including an indictor for the level of international collaboration (judged using publication data in the WOS).

The THE ranking utilises Z scores for all data sets except for the results of the academic reputation survey.

Each data point is given a score based on its distance from the mean average of the entire data set, where the scale is the standard deviation of the data set.

The Z-score is then turned into a "cumulative probability score" to arrive at the final totals.

For the results of the reputation survey, the data are highly skewed in favour of a small number of institutions at the top of the rankings. In the 2012-13 ranking, THE introduced an exponential component to increase differentiation between institutions lower down the scale.

In 2015, THE removed 649 papers with more than 1,000 authors from the citations indicator, which prevents individual very highly cited papers from skewing the citation score criteria of small institutions.

Also in 2015, THE blended equal measures of a country-adjusted and non-country-adjusted raw measure of citations scores. THE argue that this presents a 'more rigorous approach to international comparison of research publications'.

The move from Thomson Reuters to Scopus bibliometric assisted in UWA's significant rise in the 2015 ranking. At the time of the ranking Scopus covered significantly more Australian journals than Thomson Reuters, thereby increasing UWA’s score for papers per faculty member and citation scores.

The world university rankings 2016-2017 methodology.

Subject Rankings

THE also conducts rankings by subject areas, with UWA ranked in the top 100 in two key fields.

UWA's subjects rankings.

About the US News & World Ranking

US News & World – the US newspaper famous for its annual ranking of American universities – launched a global ranking system in 2014. In 2018, the ranking has refined its methodology each year since its inception; therefore, this year's results are not directly comparable to previous years'. Compared to the QS and THE rankings, the US News and World methodology has a greater focus on research, but still includes a reputational survey component.

US News & World Ranking for UWA.

Performance Indicators

Weighting of Performance Indicators.

Subject Rankings

US N&W also conducts rankings by subject areas, with UWA ranked in the top 200 in sixteen key fields:

Subject areas ranked in the top 200.