Datasets

For the calculation of this indicator, QS gathers two distinct datasets:

Citations count for six years for papers published over a five-year period

There are three major sources of publication and citation data worldwide, these are the Web of
Science from Thomson Reuters; Scopus from Elsevier and Google Scholar. In the first three
years of the QS World University Rankings™, results from the Essential Science Indicators
(ESI), a subset of the Web of Science were used. In 2007, the switch was made to Scopus for a
number of reasons, but principally due to broader journal coverage leading to results for a larger
number of institutions.

A key development in 2011 was the exclusion of self-citations.

In 2015, two significant additional modifications were applied:

1. Papers featuring authors from more than ten affiliated institutions have been excluded –
this represents around 0.34% of the database and prevents highly cited material produced
by very large research groups conferring too much credit on institutions who have only
contributed in very small part to the work. Whilst often high-profile and important
research, these papers often cause a distortion for a university that may not be especially
research active otherwise.
2. Faculty Area Normalization – due to publishing patterns and practices, a straight ratio of
citations per faculty places a strong emphasis on life sciences and medicine. In
consultation with advisors and participants, QS has opted to adopt a model which aims to
equalize the influence of research in our five key faculty areas. A more detailed technical
explanation of how this works can be found here.

In 2016, a further modification was made to the first of these changes. Rather than a fixed cap of
ten affiliated institutions, we have applied a cap that is sensitive to the publishing patterns of the
discipline to which a given paper belongs. In the previous approach, a larger proportion of papers
in Physics would have been excluded when compared to Civil Engineering, for example. The
variable cap has been calibrated to ensure that no more than 0.1% of research are excluded from
any discipline.
Full Time Equivalent (FTE) faculty

Faculty numbers used are totals… whilst it would be ideal to separate the notions of teaching and
research and use the former for calculating the Student Faculty Ratio and the latter for this
indicator, it has not been possible to do so as data to that degree of distinction has so far proved
unavailable for many countries in the study. The definition of exactly what data we request has
evolved gradually over the years to minimize ambiguity.