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Category: Rankings

Strategy Horizons at the Top

I’ve been working on a project recently, looking at current university strategic plans around the world, and particularly those of leading “world-class” universities. One of the key things I am looking at is what you might call “strategic horizons”— how long do institutions see or plan ahead? My sample for this is the Top 100 universities from the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), done by the Shanghai Rankings organization (minus the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, which is

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May 26, 2025 1 Comment

Data, Decisions, and Disruptions: Inside the World of University Rankings

University rankings are pretty much everywhere. Though the earliest university rankings in the U. S. date back to the early 1900s and the modern ones from the 1983 debut of the U. S. News and World Report rankings. The kind of rankings we tend to talk about now, international or global rankings, really only date back to 2003 with the creation of the Shanghai Academic Rankings of World Universities. Over the decade that followed that first publication, a triumvirate emerged

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February 13, 2025 No Comments

Two Advances in Research Rankings

Hi all. Just a quick one today, bringing you up to date with a couple of new and interesting developments in the field of research rankings. The first has to do with the sudden rise of “Open” bibliometric data. To date, all of the major research rankings have used data from one of the two major publishers: Elsevier or Clarivate (formerly known as Thompson Reuters). No surprise here: Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivate’s Web of Science are the main collators of

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November 12, 2024 3 Comments

Global Rankings Update 2024

Global Rankings Update 2024 Morning all. There are so many international rankings to track from one year to another that it’s easy to go a little glassy-eyed. So now that the 2025 Times Higher World Rankings are out, I thought I would do a little round up. Let’s start with how Canadian institutions did on the “Big Three” research rankings: The Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE), and the QS World

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November 11, 2024 2 Comments

Rankings Round-up (3): The Evolution of QS Rankings

Today, I will round out our rankings week by looking at the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Rankings.  These rankings have always been similar to the THE World University Rankings, because they spring from the same source: QS was the organization that actually ran the THE rankings for a few years, and when THE decided to bring the data operation in-house, QS just kept producing its rankings.  Like THE, its indicators for university rankings used are mostly a mix of field-normalized bibliometrics

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November 29, 2023 No Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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