U.S. News Best Global Universities Rankings
(31 October 2018) The release of U.S. News Best Global Universities completes the cycle for 2018. This year’s dataset includes 1,250 ranked universities from 75 countries. An additional 122 are listed and appear in subject rankings. Ruth’s Rankings 11 introduced U.S. News Best 500 Global Universities and the October 2017 News Flash provided an update. Table 1 shows the updated rankings for the world and East Asia.
The same 12 US and 2 UK universities comprise the top 14 over the past four years. Five different Asian countries are in the top 10. 460 of the universities are from all Asia, with 393 ranked. China leads with 29 in the top 500, followed by Japan with 13 and South Korea with eight. Four of Hong Kong’s seven universities are in the top 200. See Table 2 for regional and country totals. This year’s iteration includes 12 featured country reports and 22 subject rankings.
U.S. News rolled out its subject rankings at the same time as the global rankings, using Clarivate Analytics 22 Essential Science Index subject categories. Tsinghua University was tops in Computer Science and Engineering. Oxford was first in Arts & Humanities and the Netherlands Wageningen topping the two agricultural related subjects. Harvard University was number one in ten different subjects . University of Tokyo was tops in the region in seven categories, See Table 3 for the subject leaders.
The methodology bases 25% of the indicator weighting on reputation and another 45% is on size dependent metrics. This results in little change at the top of the world rankings and top world universities at the top of most subject rankings. Unlike other rankings which provide timelines, U.S. News only provides current year’s rankings for each of its 13 metrics. Users cannot re-re-rank universities on any of the metrics.
Reuters Top 100: The World’s Most Innovative Universities 2018
Ruth’s Rankings 36 Part One covered Reuters Most Innovative Universities as part of our examination of patents. In October, Reuters released a new Top 100 World Ranking. This includes nine universities from Japan, eight from South Korea, five from China and one from Singapore. No universities from Australia are on the list. See Table 4 for world rankings.
Times Higher Education Subject Rankings.
After rolling out its 2019 rankings in late September, Times Higher Education began releasing its subject rankings in mid-October. The theme appears to be more universities ranked in each subject;. THE has 11 subject areas, many with sub-categories. The weighting of the metrics and the labels of the subjects differ from the subject areas in THE World Rankings.
The first four rankings, available in October include:
- Business and economics, with MIT number one and NUS 22;
- Education, with Stanford number one and University 4
- Law, with Stanford number one and NUS 21; and
- Social Sciences. With Oxford number one and NUS (22)
Business and economics and social sciences also have sub-categories. The rest will be rolled out through the end of November. These are not rankings of professional schools.
The release of U.S. News Best Global Universities completed the cycle for another year. Our next article will feature the performance of ASEAN universities.
A list of Ruth’s Rankings and News Updates is here.
Ruth’s Rankings News Flash! is written by Ruth A. Pagell, 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
