University Rankings

Slides presented at the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) at Stellenbosch University within the CREST Master Class in Research Evaluation held between November 9 and 11, 2026. This session was held on Novembre 11, 2026.Overview of the session. In this session we will learn how university rankings came to dominate the higher education landscape, how they are constructed and the methodological choices that influence the positioning of universities in them. For this, I propose a historical account from the “American Men of Science” at the beginning of the 20th Century to today’s surge of international university rankings. Although at first they relied heavily on survey data, nowadays they are highly dependent on publication and citation data, derived in many cases from Clarivate’s Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus databases. This reliance as well as their combination with other non-bibliographic indicators (e.g., Awards or alumni data) introduce important methodological choices which have an enormous impact on their final lists but are quite controversial. In this session we will illustrate how these decisions affect specific universities. Furthermore, we will discuss how disciplinary specialization affects universities’ positioning.