By Ruth A Pagell*
(21 Apr 2025) Living in the United States and writing about higher education has been challenging so far this year. I keep getting distracted from my topic for the month—which is reputation—by all of the other news read and heard every day. It makes university rankings seem trivial. Times Higher Education (THE) has been busy updating existing rankings and introducing new rankings. This article covers THE’s Reputation Rankings. A follow-up article will examine the updated International University Rankings, the prototype for Online Learning Rankings scheduled for 2026, and Women in Leadership Roles.
REPUTATION RANKINGS
Eight years ago I wrote about reputation in Ruth’s Rankings 27 (Pagell). I had not planned on writing about it again. It seemed to me to be a popularity contest rather than a performance-based indicator. THE, QS, and US News Global all use reputation indicators in their world rankings. Times Higher Education is the one of the three to have a stand-alone ranking. It modified the methodology for the 2025 version.
THE World Reputation Rankings 2025: top universities by prestige – methodology
THE has issued Reputation Rankings since 2011, when it split from QS. The Reputation Rankings have an overall score and individual scores for research and for teaching. Changes were made in the 2025 rankings in response to integrity issues and the appearance of the same universities in the rankings. For example, in 2023 a group of universities had been voting for each other [A Middle Eastern university ranked 1000 to 1200 in world rankings but 151-175 in the reputation rankings.] No institutions from that country are included in the 2025 reputation rankings.
Data are extracted from a survey of research and teaching reputation, sent to over 55,000 respondents selected by THE. The methodology uses the following three pillars, which combine the scores from the research and teaching survey (World Methodology):
- Vote Counts (60% ): 30% of total votes for both research and teaching
- “Pairwise” (20% ): Five universities are preselected for each respondent, and respondents place these in order from one to five
- Voter diversity (20%): Universities receive extra credit for receiving votes from a wide range of countries and subjects.
Survey data will be incorporated into the 2026 World Rankings as well as in the subject and regional rankings to be released in October 2025. THE collected the data for this Reputation survey from November 2023 to January 2024. THE uses UNESCO’s data that tracks the geographic distribution of scholars.
THE Reputation Data
I examined three sets of THE results, the current 2025 rankings, the last rankings using the old methodology in 2023, and the original Reputation Rankings from 2011. The top 15 universities in 2025 are the same as those in 2023. In 2011, the University of Michigan (13), Johns Hopkins University (14), and the University of Chicago (15) appeared in the top 15. Since then, these three US universities were replaced by three Asian universities. I then compared the reputation rankings with world rankings for 2025, 2011, and 2004. In 2011, Tsinghua, Tokyo, Peking, and UCLA were not in the world top 15. In 2004, Tsinghua was the only one not in the top 15.
THE’s Reputation Rankings contributes 15% to the World Rankings Teaching pillar and 18% to Research Environment. Ranking universities in World Rankings on the Research Environment pillar, the top 14 were the same top 14 in the individual Reputation Rankings. National University of Singapore is15th in Research Environment.
Thirteen out of the top 15 universities in Reputation Rankings were the same as the top universities in the World Ranking for 2025. Tokyo remained in the top 15 for Reputation Rankings but dropped to 28 in World Rankings. Tsinghua moved into the top 20 in both the World and Reputation Rankings. Reputation changes slowly. The University of Tokyo continues to be in the top 10 in reputation at the same time that its world rankings are declining.
Reputation Data by Country
The 2011 Reputation Rankings included 100 universities from 20 countries. The 2025 version has 300 universities from 38 countries. The United States has the most universities overall and in the top 100 for 2025, 2023, and 2011. Although the total number of US universities increased along with the increase in total number of universities, the number of US universities in the top 100 decreased from 45 in 2011 to 40 in 2023 to 37 in 2025. See Table 2 for country distribution.
NOTES: Austria, Finland, South Korea, and Russian Federation had one university in the top 100 in 2011. Russian institutions are included without supporting data. The highlighted countries were excluded from the 2025 Reputation Rankings due to integrity issues.
Europe has the most countries with 18. The Asia-Pacific region has 58 universities from 13 countries. There are five universities from South America and one from Africa in the current rankings.
COMPARING REPUTATION RANKINGS
THE provides the scores listed above in the Reputation Rankings and the reputation data are embedded in the Teaching and Research pillars. Users of the public website do not see the data, just the scores and rank.
QS distributes its own reputation survey (QS). Researchers are allowed to invite colleagues to participate. Academic Reputation is a searchable metric in QS, part of its Research & Discovery lens. The top eight universities all have a score of 100. There are eleven universities found in both the QS’s and THE’s Reputation lists. The University of Toronto, Columbia University, University College London (UCL), and National University of Singapore are part of QS’ top 15 replacing THE’s Tsinghua (16), ETH (19), Imperial (22), and CalTech (29).
US News Top Global Universities uses data from Clarivate’s Academic Survey for two metrics in its rankings, Global and Regional Reputation rankings. Indicator rankings are available for each university. For example, The University of Tokyo is ranked 84th in the world with a score of 73.1. The Global Reputation rank is 11 and its regional rank for Asia is one. This highlights the gap between the university’s world ranking using bibliometrics and its reputation ranking using survey data. The US News methodology provides a detailed description of how they collect and rank universities (Morse & Wellington).
Clarivate conducts an annual Academic Reputation Survey. Data are collected from individual universities but only consolidated information at a topic or geographic level are provided in a summary report.
CONCLUSION
Reputation rankings change slowly. It is 100 years since the publication of the first peer review rankings of US universities (Hughes). Universities were ranked in different subject areas, and the names of the participants were included. For example, included in the chemistry top 15 were Harvard (1), UC Berkeley (2), MIT (3), Chicago (4), Yale (5), CalTech (7), Princeton (8), Johns Hopkins (10), and Stanford (16).
THE’s reputation rankings for top universities are similar to their world rankings as shown In Table 1. Articles on the current university situation in the US do not discuss the potential impact on university rankings or bibliometrics. Given the lag between the data collection dates and the release dates of the next round of reputation and world rankings, the 2026 rankings will not reflect the current political situation in the US. As I look further into the future, to the reputation ranking dated 2027, it will be interesting to see the effect of the current political situation in the US on world rankings. I wonder what the top 15 list of universities will look like. Right now, in April 2025, it is difficult to imagine what the landscape will look like next month!
RESOURCES
Academic Reputation Survey: 2024 Finings Report (2025) retrieved 1 April 2025, https://clarivate.com/academia-government/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/dlm_uploads/2025/01/Academic-Reputation-Survey-2024-Findings-Report.pdf
Hughes, R.M. (1925). A study of the graduate schools of America. University of Miami (Oxford Ohio), accessible through Hathitrust. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015025025019&seq=17
Morse, R. & Wellington, S. (24 Jun 2024). How US News Calculated the 2024-2025 Best Global Universities Rankings. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/articles/methodology Note: I needed to provide an email address and password to access the rankings. Only current year data are available.
QS Academic Survey process: https://support.qs.com/hc/en-gb/articles/360021859279-Academic-and-Employer-Survey-Contacts-Submission-Procedure
QS Support: https://support.qs.com/hc/en-gb/articles/4405952675346-Academic-Reputation-Indicator
The data team (4 Feb, 2025). World Reputation Rankings 2025: Methodology https://timeshighereducation.com/world-reputation-rankings
World Reputation Rankings (Feb 2025.) Methodology for the Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings 2025. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/sites/default/files/breaking_news_files/the_world_reputation_rankings_2025_methodology.pdf
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
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
