These rankings can be conducted at the national or international level, assessing institutions within a single country, within a specific geographical region, or worldwide.
Rankings may also consider various combinations of measures of specialization expertise, student options, award numbers, internationalization, graduate employment, industrial linkage, historical reputation and other criteria.
UNESCO has even questioned whether rankings "do more harm than good," noting that while "Rightly or wrongly, they are perceived as a measure of quality and so create intense competition between universities all over the world".
[5][6][7][8][9][10] They have been criticized for being "largely based on what can be measured rather than what is necessarily relevant and important to the university",[9] and the validity of the data available globally has been questioned.
[5] Many rankings are also considered to contain biases towards the natural sciences and, due to the bibliometric sources used, towards publication in English-language journals.
These criteria update led to the inclusion of five Central Asian nations - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan - as well as Iran.
[citation needed] The top ten universities in the Arab world represent a diverse array of institutions spanning various countries.
[52] Since 2022, ARTU has included Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Research & Development (R&D) expenditure as modifiers to determine country level performance and return on investment.
[63] Academic Influence allows users to create rankings on the fly through its dynamic schools and people tools, which can be filtered by discipline, country, and period.
The Subject portion of the ranking is based on the number of research articles in top-tier journals with data obtained from Clarivate Analytics.
[68] The Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities was produced until 2012 by the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT).
[77] RUR is aimed to provide a transparent, comprehensive analytical system for benchmarking and evaluating universities across the borders to the widest possible audience: students, analysts, decision-makers in the field of higher education development both at individual institutional and at the national level.
By providing students with clearer information to guide their study choices, this is a fresh tool for more quality, relevance and transparency in European higher education.
Possible reasons include publishing via independent research councils (CNRS, Max Planck, CNR) or the large amount of non-English Web content, which is less likely to be linked.
This system is based on Human Resources & Labour Review Indexes, the HRI and LRI, which measure the performance of top 300 universities' graduates.
The Times Higher Education Supplement (The Thes) is publishing Japan University Rankings once a year, using a balanced scorecard approach, with 16 individual performance indicators combining to create an overall score that reflects the broad strength of an institution.
[122] Japanese preparatory school Kawaijuku also released the Japan's Top 30 University Rankings in Natural Sciences and Technology for MEXT's GLOBAL 30 Project in 2001.
In December 2008, the European Commission published a call for tenders, inviting bidders to design and test a new multi-dimensional university ranking system with global outreach.
[136] The system ranks programs based on more than 50 indicators, such as teaching and learning conditions, scientific research, career development opportunities, prestige, and material resources.
Le Nouvel Observateur occasionally offer rankings of "Grandes écoles" and their preparatory schools, the "Prépas", and of universities' undergraduate degrees in some areas.
The Sunday Times ranks Irish universities based on a mix of criteria, including secondary school examination scores, graduation rates, staff-student ratio, research efficiency, accommodation, nontraditional students, athletics and sports facilities.
[139] Furthermore, the ministerial Agency for the Evaluation of University and Research (ANVUR) publishes every five years a detailed analysis regarding the entirety of the higher education institutions in the country, with a range of grades from D to A.
The ranking used 19 indicators of academic performance and competitiveness, covering major mission aspects of HEIs such as teaching, research and social service.
RIA Novosty / Forbes rankings are conducted under the supervision of Public Chamber of Russia in cooperation with State University – Higher School of Economics.
[citation needed] It covers 476 higher education institutions and is based on the average score of the Unified State Examination that is required to enter a university.
[147] Interfax' methodology quantifies several qualitative factors such as research, teaching standards, public opinion and social and international activity.
[citation needed] In Sweden, the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (Svenskt Näringsliv) conduct an annual survey and ranking of higher education at study program level, based on entry salary, career development, internationalization, and degree of academic-business collaboration.
Participating institutions receive grants from one of the four higher education funding bodies in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
[163] ECUM provides data on institutional participation in articles on ISI Web of Knowledge–indexed journals; faculty participation in each of Mexico's three-level National Researchers System (SNI[164]); graduate degrees within National Council of Science and Technology's (CONACYT) register of quality graduate programs;[165] and number of academic research bodies (cuerpos academicos) according to the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) program PROMEP.
Based on this comparative study project, ECUM's creator, the Dirección General de Evaluación Institucional, published reports providing an analysis of the data for 2007 and 2008.