Methodology – Citations per Faculty
| 20% |
Citations, evaluated in some fashion to take into account the size of institution, are the best understood and most widely accepted measure of research strength.
Often calculated on a “per paper” basis, the QS World University Rankings™ has adopted a “per faculty member” approach since its inception in 2004. The Citations per Faculty score contributes 20% to the overall rankings score.
For the calculation of this indicator, QS gathers two distinct datasets:
Total citation count for the last five years
There are three major sources of publication and citation data worldwide, these are the Web of Science from Thomson Reuters; Scopus from Elsevier and Google Scholar. In the first three years of the QS World University Rankings™, results from the Essential Science Indicators (ESI), a subset of the Web of Science were used. In 2007, the switch was made to Scopus for a number of reasons, but principally due to broader journal coverage leading to results for a larger number of institutions.
A key development in 2011 has been the exclusion of self-citations.
Full Time Equivalent (FTE) faculty
Faculty numbers used are totals… whilst it would be ideal to separate the notions of teaching and research and use the former for calculating the Student Faculty Ratio and the latter for this indicator, it has not been possible to do so as data to that degree of distinction has so far proved unavailable for many countries in the study. The definition of exactly what data we request has evolved gradually over the years to minimize ambiguity.
Scopus is a rapidly evolving system, data included in the QS export may differ significantly from the current content of Scopus online.
Many commentators have suggested that, given the accepted validity of citations, this measure should carry a significantly higher weighting than it does. Ultimately, however, this places extremely strong emphasis both on medical and life sciences and on institutions from countries where the principal medium of instruction is English.
Whilst it has its critics, the Academic Reputation Survey places equal emphasis on Arts and Social Sciences as it does on Natural and Life Sciences. This is its great strength and, above all, the reason why it carries such a high weighting.
At time of writing, Scopus is working to add more books to its index, which ought to help in less scientific fields ad QS continue to seek alternative measures to evaluate outputs from lower citing disciplines.
Do you exclude cross-citations of the academics from the same univeristy? After this scores should be normalized to eliminate odds given to small univeristies which have less cross-citations than large ones.
We exclude self-citations. That is to say, citations by any author to their own previously published work. It doesn’t make sense to eliminate cross citations within a certain university as it just serves to eliminate the competitivenss of institutions with large, well-funded research departments in any given field. These are the places where much of the science is really happening so it would not make sense to discriminate against them. Furthermore, we already take into account size by making this a citations per faculty indicator – to normalize for size and then divide by a proxy for size would result in a double penalty for large institutions.
I have a question. When you calculate the citation per faculty, do you include all the citations ever incurred by a single faculty, regardless of the year? Or, do you limit the time window to do this calculation (say during the last 10 years, for example)?
How are foreign language publications accounted for?
We are constrained by the strengths and weaknesses of the data source here. Inevitably this results in a focus on English but Scopus does include non-English articles as long as they have English language abstracts and as a result has far better coverage in other languages than its rivals.