Latin America University Rankings 2024: methodology

The Latin America University Rankings 2024 will be published on 12 November.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings are the only global performance tables that judge research-intensive universities across all their core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. The Latin America University Rankings uses the same carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons, trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and even governments – but the weightings are specially recalibrated to reflect the characteristics of universities in emerging economies.

This ninth edition of the Latin America rankings introduces significant updates to the original methodology, in line with the changes made to the World University Rankings methodology last year. These improvements ensure that the rankings continue to reflect the outputs of the diverse range of research-intensive universities across the world, now and in the future. 

We have moved from 13 to 18 carefully calibrated performance indicators. One of the metrics (study abroad) currently has zero weight but will be counted in future, while the citation impact metric is no longer used in the Latin America rankings. Some changes to institutions’ scores will be influenced by these methodological changes and we would advise noting that when making comparisons with previous year’s results.

The performance indicators are still grouped into five areas, but some of the names have been updated: teaching (the learning environment); research environment (volume, income and reputation); research quality (research strength, research excellence and research influence); international outlook (staff, students and research); and industry (income and patents).

Teaching (the learning environment): 35%

• Teaching reputation: 15%
• Institutional income: 6%
• Doctorates-awarded-to-academic-staff ratio: 5%
• Doctorate-to-bachelor’s ratio: 4.5%
• Staff-to-student ratio: 4.5%

The most recent Academic Reputation Survey (run annually and conducted by THE) that underpins this category was carried out between November 2023 and January 2024. We have run the survey to ensure a balanced spread of responses across disciplines and countries. Where disciplines or countries were over- or under-represented, THE’s data team weighted the responses to fully reflect the global distribution of scholars. The 2024 data is combined with the results of the 2023 survey, giving more than 93,000 responses.

As well as giving a sense of how committed an institution is to nurturing the next generation of academics, a high proportion of postgraduate research students also suggests the provision of teaching at the highest level that is thus attractive to graduates and effective at developing them. This indicator is normalised to take account of a university’s unique subject mix, reflecting that the volume of doctoral awards varies by discipline.

Institutional income is scaled against academic staff numbers and normalised for purchasing power parity (PPP). It indicates an institution’s general status and gives a broad sense of the infrastructure and facilities available to students and staff.

The most prominent indicator in this category looks at a university’s reputation for research excellence among its peers, based on the responses to our annual Academic Reputation Survey (see below).

Research environment: 33.5%

• Research reputation: 18%
• Research productivity: 10%
• Research income: 5.5%

Research income is scaled against academic staff numbers and adjusted for PPP. This is a controversial indicator because it can be influenced by national policy and economic circumstances. But income is crucial to the development of world-class research, and because much of it is subject to competition and judged by peer review, our experts suggested that it was a valid measure. This indicator is fully normalised to take account of each university’s distinct subject profile, reflecting the fact that research grants in science subjects are often bigger than those awarded for the highest-quality social science, arts and humanities research.

To measure productivity we count the volume of scholarly output including articles, reviews, conference proceedings, books and book chapters indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database per scholar, scaled for institutional size and normalised for subject. This gives a sense of the university’s ability to get papers published in quality peer-reviewed journals.

Research quality: 20%

• Research strength: 6.7%
• Research excellence: 6.7%
• Research influence: 6.6%

Our research quality pillar looks at universities’ role in spreading new knowledge and ideas.

This year, three new research quality measures have been introduced. Research strength calculates the 75th percentile of field-weighted citation impact – a robust guide to how strong typical research is.

Research excellence looks at the number of research publications in the top 10 per cent for field-weighted citation impact worldwide – a guide to the amount of world-leading research at an institution. It is normalised by year, subject and staff numbers.

Research influence helps us understand when research is recognised in turn by the most influential research in the world – a broader look at excellence. The idea behind the metric is that the value of citations is not equal: a citation from an “important” paper is more significant than a citation from an “unimportant” one. We use an iterative method to measure the importance of a paper by not only counting the number of citations but taking into account the importance of the citing papers. We also consider the subject of the research, because different disciplines have different citation patterns.

The previous “citation impact” metric is given a weight of 0% in the Latin America rankings. 

This year, our bibliometric data supplier Elsevier examined more than 157 million citations to 18 million journal articles, article reviews, conference proceedings, books and book chapters published over five years. The data includes more than 30,000 academic journals indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database and all indexed publications between 2019 and 2023. Citations to these publications made in the six years from 2019 to 2024 are also collected. This data is now analysed by THE's data team, rather than Elsevier. 

The citations help to show us how much each university is contributing to the sum of human knowledge: they tell us whose research has stood out, has been picked up and built on by other scholars and, most importantly, has been shared around the global scholarly community to expand the boundaries of our understanding, irrespective of discipline.

The data are normalised to reflect variations in citation volume between different subject areas. This means that institutions with high levels of research activity in subjects with traditionally high citation counts do not gain an unfair advantage.

International outlook: 7.5%

• Proportion of international students: 2.5%
• Proportion of international staff: 2.5%
• International collaboration: 2.5%

The ability of a university to attract undergraduates, postgraduates and faculty from all over the planet is key to its success on the world stage. In the third international indicator, we calculate the proportion of a university’s total relevant publications that have at least one international co-author and reward higher volumes. This indicator is normalised to account for a university’s subject mix and uses the same five-year window as the “Research quality” category.

Large countries have been disadvantaged compared with small countries in our international metrics, in that it is “easier” for staff and students in small countries to work or study abroad.​ This has led us to change our normalisation approach for the three measures in 2023, henceforth taking into consideration the population of a country when evaluating these metrics.

A study abroad metric – assessing the provision of international learning opportunities for domestic students – complements the International Outlook pillar, but is currently given a weight of 0%. The zero weight is a temporary provision because of the impact of Covid-19 on international travel. 

Industry: 4%

• Industry income: 2%
• Patents: 2%

A university’s ability to help industry with innovations, inventions and consultancy has become a core mission of the contemporary global academy. The industry income metric seeks to capture such knowledge transfer activity by looking at how much research income an institution earns from industry (adjusted for PPP), scaled against the number of academic staff it employs.

The metric suggests the extent to which businesses are willing to pay for research and a university’s ability to attract funding in the commercial marketplace – useful indicators of institutional quality.

But the extent to which universities are supporting their national economies through technology transfer is an area that deserves greater recognition. The new patents metric is defined as the number of patents from any source that cite research conducted by the university.

The data is provided by Elsevier and relates to patents published between 2019 and 2023 (not research published between these dates). This year, sources for patents have been extended beyond the World Intellectual Property Organisation, the European Patent Office, and the patent offices of the US, the UK and Japan, to include more than 100 patent offices around the world. In total, 43 are relevant for the time period.

This measure is subject-weighted to avoid penalising universities producing research in fields low in patents, and scaled for institutional size.

Reporter institutions

Universities at the bottom of the table that are listed as having “reporter” status provided data but did not meet our eligibility criteria to receive a rank. Find out more about reporter institutions here.

Exclusions

Universities are excluded from the Latin America University Rankings if they do not teach undergraduates or if their research output amounted to fewer than 200 publications between 2019 and 2023. Universities can also be excluded if 80 per cent or more of their research output is exclusively in one of our 11 subject areas.

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 conservative estimate. By doing this, we avoid penalising an institution too harshly with a “zero” value for data that it overlooks or does not provide, but we do not reward it for withholding the data.

Getting to the final result

Moving from a series of specific data points to indicators, and finally to a total score for an institution, requires us to match values that represent fundamentally different data. To do this we use a standardisation approach for each indicator, then combine the indicators in the proportions indicated in the graphic.

The standardisation approach we use is based on the distribution of data within a particular indicator, where we calculate a cumulative probability function, and evaluate where a particular institution’s indicator sits within that function.

For all indicators except for the Academic Reputation Survey we calculate the cumulative probability function using a version of Z-scoring. The distribution of the data in the Academic Reputation Survey requires us to add an exponential component.