How U.S. News Calculated the Best Global UniversitiesRankings
Find out how U.S. News determined the world's topuniversities overall and by region and country.
By Robert Morse and Juan Vega-Rodriguez Oct. 19, 2020, at 9:00p.m.
THE SEVENTHANNUAL U.S. News & World Report Best GlobalUniversities
rankings were produced to provide insight into howuniversities compare globally. Since an increasing numberof students plan to enroll in universities outside of their owncountry, the Best Global Universities rankings – which focus specifically on schools' academic research and reputation overall and not on their separate undergraduate or graduate programs –can help those applicants accurately compare institutions around the world.
The Best Global Universities rankings alsoprovide insight into how U.S. universities –which U.S. News has been ranking separately for more than 30 years – standglobally. All universities can benchmark themselves against schools in their own country and region, become more visible on the world stage, and find top schools in other countries to consider collaborating with.
The overall Best GlobalUniversities rankings encompass nearly 1,500 top institutions spreadacross 86 countries, up from 81 countries last year. The first stepin producing these rankings, which are powered by Clarivate,involved creating a pool of 1,748 universities that was used to rank thetop 1,500 schools.
To create the pool of 1,748, U.S. Newsfirst included the top 250 universities in the results of Clarivate's global reputation survey, described further below. Next,U.S. News added institutions that had met the minimum threshold of at least1,250 papers published in 2014 to 2018, down from 1,500 papers last year. Thelast step was to remove duplicates and institutions that are not schools to reach the final 2021 ranking pool of 1,748 institutions.
As a result of these criteria, manystand-alone graduate schools, including Rockefeller University in NewYork and the University of California—San Francisco, were eligible to be ranked and were included in the ranking universe.
The second step was to calculate therankings using the 13 indicators and weights that U.S. News chose tomeasure global research performance. Each of the school's profile pages on usnews.com lists the overall global score as well as numerical ranks for the 13 indicators, allowing students to compare each school's standing in each indicator.
The indicators and their weights inthe ranking formula are listed in the table below, with related indicators grouped together; an explanation of each follows.
