QS World University Rankings exist to give students, academics, funders, politicians and policymakers, a broad view of the top institutions in world higher education.

To do this we use broad measures which are intended to capture teaching, research, employability and international appeal, to produce an overall indicator of institutional standing. By contrast, other university rankings take a range of approaches. The Academic Ranking of World Universities, produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, focuses on science, and other systems now being designed to pay more attention to teaching.

We have confidence in the measures we use, and, over the last six years, have made only one material change to them - the introduction of the employer review criterion in our second year.

Because we designed these rankings to measure universities in the round, the institutions they include have to teach undergraduates. This excludes many postgraduate colleges of undoubted merit, from London Business School to the University of California at San Francisco. Each university also has to work in at least two of the five principal areas of academic life: science, biomedicine, technology, social sciences and the arts and humanities.

A glance at the World University Rankings 2009 will show that the top 200 institutions are far from being a uniform group. They vary in size, the subjects they cover and their commitment to research, although all are substantial producers of new knowledge.

To make this distinction simpler to understand, we are publishing a typology of the top 200 universities for the first time with the World University Rankings 2009.
This classification, which we have developed, is consistent with the Berlin Principles on university ranking developed by the International Rankings Expert Group, which calls for maximum clarity about the measures employed.

Its focus is on three main characteristics of a university: size, scope, and research intensiveness. We first divide the field into small, medium and large universities, depending on how many students they have, with a threshold of 5,000 for a medium-sized institution and 12,000 for a large one.
 

Next is the academic scope of each institution. We regard a “fully comprehensive” university as being one that is active in all five areas of scholarship – science, technology, biomedicine, social sciences and the arts and humanities – and which has a medical school. Institutions that are active in all five fields, but which lack a medical school, we term “comprehensive,” while we use the terms “focused” and “specialist” for those that work in fewer categories.
 

Our final criterion is the amount of research a university has produced in the past five years as identified by our colleagues at Scopus . An institution’s rank here depends on the number of scholarly areas in which it is active and is not an absolute threshold.

What does this analysis show? The big beasts of the jungle are the A1 universities, which are big, research-intensive and active in all areas. They also have medical schools, which generate more cash and more citations than any other university department. And it turns out that 14 of our top 20 universities are A1s, as are 113 of our top 200.

The World University Rankings were set up to measure general universities, not specialist colleges and schools, and that is what they do. A further 23 of the top 200 are in the A2 group – still large, but a little less productive of research – and 22 are in group E1, highly research-intensive in all fields but with fewer students. Yale, number three in our ranking, is an E1 institution.

However, a more interesting story lies beneath. The London School of Economics, 67th in the rankings, has long complained that its social science specialism prevents it from featuring as highly in our rankings as it should. It is, in fact, the only H1 institution in our top 200, showing that it is the best medium-sized, research-intensive specialist university in the world.

This classification system also points up the large number of science and technology specialists which do well in the rankings, many of which appear in groups F1 and G1. They include world names such as Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), EPFL in Switzerland and KAIST in Korea.

This analysis also shows that small universities find it hard to look good in our rankings. Types I, J, K and L, with fewer than 5,000 students, contribute only six of the top 200. Three of these are elite, research-intensive French institutions which produce most of that country’s top executives, politicians and public servants.

One thing we have always known about the World University Rankings is that as soon as they are published, the cleverest people in the world set about analysing them. We encourage this activity, and we are sure that this new classification system in 2009 will provide the basis for even more ways of looking at the data we present here.
 

By Martin Ince, QS World University Rankings