The Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings by Subject uses the same methodology framework as the THE World University Rankings, but with recalibrated indicator weights tailored to each subject area.
The rankings cover 11 broad subject areas:
- Arts & Humanities
- Business & Economics
- Clinical & Health
- Computer Science
- Education
- Engineering
- Law
- Life Sciences
- Physical Sciences
- Psychology
- Social Sciences
Indicator Framework
The same five pillars and 18 indicators used in the overall THE World University Rankings are applied:
| Pillar | Indicators |
|---|---|
| Teaching | Reputation survey, Staff-to-student ratio, Doctorate-to-bachelor's ratio, Doctorates awarded to staff ratio, Institutional income |
| Research Environment | Reputation survey, Research income, Research productivity |
| Research Quality | Citation impact, Research strength, Research excellence, Research influence |
| Industry | Industry income, Patents |
| International Outlook | International students, International staff, International co-authorship |
Subject-Specific Adjustments
While the indicator framework remains consistent, the weights assigned to each pillar are adjusted for different subject areas to reflect their distinct characteristics. For example, subjects with stronger industry links may give greater weight to the Industry pillar, while humanities subjects may place more emphasis on the Teaching and Research Environment pillars.
The reputation survey results are filtered by subject area, using only responses from academics who identify expertise in the relevant field.
Citation and publication data from the Scopus database is mapped to each subject area, and citation impact is field-normalized to allow fair comparison across disciplines with different publication and citation cultures.
Data Sources
- Academic Reputation Survey: THE annual survey of scholars worldwide
- Publication and citation data: Scopus (Elsevier)
- Patent data: Patsnap
- Institutional data: Submitted by universities and verified by THE