By Ruth A Pagell*
(2 Jan 2025) Many decades ago, when I began working in academia, before global rankings, researchers were expected to write articles on their own. Today’s articles may be written by one author or a hundred authors, in the same or different departments, universities, or anywhere in the world, with or without input from artificial intelligence.
THE Interdisciplinary Rankings 2025 (ISR)
THE’s Interdisciplinary Science Rankings (ISR) is an aspect of scholarly collaboration. The definition below is one of the oldest and most cited definition of interdisciplinary rankings.
Multidisciplinarity draws on knowledge from different disciplines but stays within their boundaries, Interdisciplinarity analyzes, synthesizes and harmonizes links between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole. Transdisciplinarity integrates the natural, social and health sciences in a humanities context, and transcends their traditional boundaries (Choi & Pak).
THE worked with Schmidt Science Fellows to create ISR. The definition for THE’s purposes is that “The Interdisciplinary Science Rankings measure global universities’ contributions and commitment to interdisciplinary science”. Listings in the Ranking is similar to THE’s Impact Rankings, where universities choose to opt in. The first Impact rankings, released in 2019, had 467 universities from 77 countries. Today the total number for Impact Rankings is approaching 2000. The inaugural ISR Rankings has 749 ranked universities and 274 additional unranked reporters. ISR universities represent 92 countries. The press release for ISR provides rankings data by continent and country (Out Now).
The methodology includes three pillars and 11 metrics. Universities are ranked as Overall and by Inputs. Process, and Outputs. India is the top country in number of universities. The United States has seven of the top 10 universities and is number one in the top 100 with 16. Italy has seven in the top 100, India and Saudi Arabia have six, and Hong Kong and Japan have five. Asia/Pac dominates the top 100 with 36, including four from Australia.
See Table 1 below, including the metrics and the top universities in the world and Asia/Pac for the pillars.
Interdisciplinary Science Rankings 2025 Methodology (THE Reporters)
INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE as a performance measure
There is no standard definition for Interdisciplinary Science. Choi and Pak did a literature review looking at terminology used in multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplarity publications in the health sciences from 1982 to 2007. Other definitions categorize “interdisciplinary” as a type of collaboration. (Anderson); (Warren & Warren).
Months before THE released ISR, Daley and Hantrais critiqued the methodology. They concluded that the methodology is a poor measure for research and teaching quality. Their concerns included a lack of a standard definition, failure to include collaboration across institutions and countries, and exclusion of social science and humanities. Building on the authors’ concerns, I see ISR as a narrow approach, not capturing the collaboration with research institutions and industry, nor the high percent of global collaborations captured in CWTS Leiden’s Collaboration rankings, one option under Type of Indicator.
Collaboration is a metric in other rankings, covered in RR 35 (Pagell). THE World includes International Co-authorship weighted at 2.5 under international outlook which is weighted overall at 7.5%. QS uses the terminology International Research Network, weighted at 5% under the Global Engagement lens, worth 15%. Scimago includes it as International Collaboration at 2%. U.S. News uses International Collaboration relative to country (5%) and another 5% for the percent publications with international co-authors. It is the only ranking that displays the ranking for each indicator for each university. For example, Singapore Management University has a world rank of 577 and an International Collaboration ranking of 92. These data are only available for each individual metric for each university but not as a league table.
ISR AND SCHOLARLY OUTPUT
There is a difference between articles about interdisciplinary research and articles written by interdisciplinary authors. Bibliometric databases provide publications about interdisciplinary research, the universities producing the articles, and relevant journals that publish articles on the topic.
THE worked with Elsevier on the bibliometrics for this ranking. The Scopus database has keywords for Interdisciplinary Research and Interdisciplinary Communication. Researchers can access a list of open access journals related to “interdisciplinary” on DOAJ (https://doaj.org/).
An interesting article by a group of young researchers describes their experience with interdisciplinary research (Mahringer, et.al)
The importance of interdisciplinary science is not in question (Blessinger). THE’s ISR ranking measures one aspect of collaboration, as shown in the illustration below,
SciVal, December 2024
See the tables in the Appendix for top universities and countries in THE’s ISR, Impact, and World rankings. It is important to keep in mind that the top universities kin ISR and Impact are based on those universities that chose to opt in.
GUIDELINES ON USING RANKINGS
Users of rankings have a responsibility to understand the rankings they are using:
CWTS Leiden Responsible Use https://www.leidenranking.com/information/responsibleuse
IREG Observatory on Academic Rankings and Excellence (2023) https://ireg-observatory.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/IREG-guidelines2023.pdf
RESOURCES
Anderson, B.(22 Nov 2023). Strategies for Successful Interdisciplinary Collaborations. https://etd.gatech.edu/2023/11/22/strategies-for-successful-interdisciplinary-collaborations/
Blessinger, P., Singh, A. & Giridharan, B. (13 Dec 2024). Addressing real-world challenges with interdisciplinary learning. University world News. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20241210123055892
Choi BC & Pak AW. Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in health research, services, education and policy: 1. Definitions, objectives, and evidence of effectiveness. Clin Invest Med. 2006 Dec;29(6):351-64. PMID: 17330451. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17330451/
Daley, C. & Hantrais, L. (17 Jan 2024). A ranking for interdisciplinarity is a poor measure for the quality of research and teaching in universities. LSE Blog https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2024/01/17/a-ranking-for-interdisciplinarity-is-a-poor-measure-for-the-quality-of-research-and-teaching-in-universities/
Mahringer, C.A., Baessler, F. Gerchen, M.F. et.al.( 15 Dec 2023). Benefits and obstacles of interdisciplinary research: Insights from members of the Young Academy at the Heidelberg Academy of Science and Humanities. https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(23)02585-3?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2589004223025853%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
Out Now: Times Higher Education Interdisciplinary Science Rankings 2025. (Nov 21 2024). https://www.timeshighereducation.com/press-releases/out-now-times-higher-education-interdisciplinary-science-rankings-2025
Pagell, R.A. (11 June 2018 ) Ruth’s Rankings 35: Come together. https://librarylearningspace.com/ruths-rankings-35-come-together-may-updates-lead-investigation-collaboration/
THE Reporters (15 Nov 2024). Interdisciplinary Science Rankings 2025: Methodology. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/interdisciplinary-science-rankings-2025-methodology
Warren J.L, Warren J.S. ( Summer 2023).The Case for Understanding Interdisciplinary Relationships in Health Care. Ochsner J. doi:10.31486/toj.22.0111. PMID: 37323516; PMCID: PMC10262946.. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37323516/
Ruth’s Rankings
A list of Ruth’s Rankings and News Updates is here.
*Ruth A. Pagell is emeritus faculty librarian at Emory University. After working at Emory, she was the founding librarian of the Li Ka Shing Library at Singapore Management University and then adjunct faculty [teaching] in the Library and Information Science Program at the University of Hawaii. She has written and spoken extensively on various aspects of librarianship, including contributing articles to ACCESS – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3238-9674
