What Does a University’s Rank Really Tell Us...

Times Higher Education (THE) and QS rankings can tell very different stories about the same university. For Pakistan, the bigger question is whether these rankings reflect what matters most: research that translates into innovation, funding and national impact. Why does the same university sometimes look remarkably different in the Times Higher Education and QS world rankings? The question sounds simple, but the answer reveals something much bigger about the way universities—and increasingly entire higher education systems—measure research. The temptation, whenever a new ranking is released, is to look at the number first. Did the university rise? Did it fall? Who moved ahead? Who slipped behind? Perhaps the more useful question is: what exactly is the ranking measuring? This distinction matters because THE and QS may be working with broadly similar bibliometric data, yet they can tell very different stories about the same institution. At the heart of the difference is a deceptively simple choice: what do you divide research performance by? QS’s Citations per Faculty indicator essentially asks how much cited research is produced in relation to the size of the academic faculty. THE’s research-quality framework, by contrast, places much greater emphasis on how well a university’s publications perform against comparable research worldwide. In other words, one approach places considerable weight on research impact per academic, while the other asks more directly about the citation performance of the research itself. That difference can matter enormously. Imagine a specialized science and technology institute with 400 academics producing 4,000 papers over five years. Now compare it with a comprehensive university employing 4,000 academics and producing 20,000 papers. The smaller institution produces far more papers per academic. The larger institution, however, may produce papers that are cited substantially more often. Depending on which question we ask, the same two universities can therefore appear very different. Neither conclusion is necessarily wrong. They are simply answers to different questions. The denominator matters. This is where university leaders should pay particular attention. In a per-faculty system, the definition of faculty becomes important. Should research-only staff, postdocs, clinicians or teaching-focused…