Measuring the real-world impact of universities

At the 2024 THE World Academic Summit, senior leaders from the higher education sector gathered to discuss the impact of universities and the role of data in a rapidly changing world. M’hamed el Aisati, vice-president of analytical and data services at Elsevier, spoke about research excellence and what we can learn from bibliometric data. 

As a scientific publisher and data analytics company, Elsevier delivers insights to help universities, research institutions and governments. Its platform, Scopus, is an abstract and citation database. 

Speaking about the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, Duncan Ross, chief data officer at THE, said: “We have minimum criteria for participation based on the volume of academic research published and indexed in Scopus. That is a threshold of 1,000 papers with a minimum number of papers per year. We require universities to teach at an undergraduate level and conduct research in more than one subject area.” 

When the first World University Rankings were launched in 2004, 200 universities participated. The first rankings largely focused on US and UK universities, with some European universities, according to Ross. In 2024, 1,094 universities were ranked. That increase represents the expansion of higher education across the world, said Ross.

Elsevier is THE’s bibliometric partner, providing the statistical analysis of books, articles, journals and other publications. THE uses data from three sources – reputation surveys, direct data from universities and bibliometric data from Elsevier – to calculate 17 metrics across five areas, including research strength, research excellence and research influence.

However, as El Aisati explained, Elsevier wanted to look beyond traditional outputs such as publications, citations and patents to measure the real-world impact of data. It created an academic evaluation framework to provide a qualitative assessment of research, enabling researchers to form a narrative about the research they conduct, said El Aisati.

One interesting revelation from the data THE gathered was the growing impact of universities in South-east Asia and India. “It is a genuine change across every single metric. We’re seeing their research influence and research excellence improve and their citation impact driving research quality upwards,” said Ross. It represents a new era in terms of research, where we’re seeing new institutions growing rapidly. This is going to be an interesting trend to follow over the next few years and see what impact that has on the performance of universities elsewhere in the world,” he said.

Speakers:

• Duncan Ross, chief data officer, Times Higher Education 
• M’hamed el Aisati, vice-president of analytical and data services, Elsevier

Find out more about Elsevier.