Impact Rankings 2021: good health and well-being (SDG 3) methodology

This ranking focuses on universities’ research on the key conditions and diseases that have a disproportionate impact on health outcomes across the world, their support for healthcare professions, and the health of students and staff. It is not a general measure of a university’s medical teaching and research.

View the methodology for the Impact Rankings 2021 to find out how these data are used in the overall ranking. 

Metrics

Research on health and well-being (27%)

• Proportion of research papers that are viewed or downloaded (10%)
• Proportion of research papers that are cited in clinical guidance (10%)
• Number of publications (7%)

This focuses on research that is relevant to key diseases and conditions, measuring paper views, clinical citations and the volume of research produced.

The data are provided by Elsevier’s Scopus dataset, based on a query of keywords associated with SDG 3 (good health and well-being) and supplemented by additional publications identified by artificial intelligence. The data include all indexed publications between 2015 and 2019 and are normalised across the range using Z-scoring.

Proportion of health graduates (34.6%)

In order to understand how a university is supporting health professions, we measure the proportion of graduates who receive a degree associated with a health-related profession out of the institution’s total number of graduates.

The data relate to the number of graduates in the 2019 academic year. The degree does not necessarily give them the ability to practise directly; additional qualifications may be required.

The data were provided directly by universities and normalised across the range using Z-scoring.

Collaborations and health services (38.4%)

• Smoke-free policy (8%)
• Collaborations with local, national or global health institutions to improve health and well-being outcomes (7%)
• Outreach programmes in the local community to improve or promote health and well-being (7%)
• Access to sexual and reproductive healthcare services for students (7%)
• Access to mental health support for students and staff (7%)
• Community access to university sports facilities (2.4%)

The evidence was provided directly by universities, evaluated and scored by Times Higher Education and not normalised.

Evidence

When we ask about policies and initiatives, our metrics require universities to provide the evidence to support their claims. Evidence is evaluated against a set of criteria and decisions are cross-validated where there is uncertainty. Evidence is not required to be exhaustive – we are looking for examples that demonstrate best practice at the institutions concerned.

Time frame

Unless otherwise stated, the data used refer to the closest academic year to January to December 2019.

Exclusions

The ranking is open to any university that teaches at either undergraduate or postgraduate level. Although research activities form part of the methodology, there is no minimum research requirement for participation.

THE reserves the right to exclude universities that they believe have falsified data, or are no longer in good standing.

Data collection

Institutions provide and sign off their institutional data for use in the rankings. On the rare occasions when a particular data point is not provided, we enter a value of zero.

View the full methodology for the THE Impact Rankings 2021 here.