Big new tables, small refinements: how our rankings are advancing

Browse the full results of the World University Rankings 2025

It has been another record-breaking year. We are thrilled that more than 2,000 universities are included in the 2025 edition of our World University Rankings, making it the largest evaluation of research performance in the world.

The methodology remains the same as last year, although we have decided to reduce the minimum annual number of research papers required for university inclusion from 150 to 100. The overall number remains the same at 1,000 publications in a five-year period.

We are delighted to have entered into a new agreement with our bibliometric partner Elsevier that gives us far greater access to its underlying data. This, in turn, allows us to understand and to analyse research outputs in greater detail.

We have also been working to further strengthen our data quality assurance, including tightening up definitions, and to address rare and unusual behaviour in voting patterns. Alongside this, we are building a new data quality engine and process to further improve our assessment of data submitted by universities.

In the future, we hope to do more work on assessing bibliometric performance, extending the changes we introduced to the research quality pillar last year.

But the World University Rankings are not our only ranking, and we have been doing new work in other areas too.

Interdisciplinary Science Rankings

We will be exploring the role and performance of interdisciplinary research with the launch of our first ever Interdisciplinary Science Rankings in November. This analysis examines research outputs, as well as the actions that universities put in place to support interdisciplinarity.

On my recent visit to the United Nations High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, it was plain to see the vital role that interdisciplinarity plays in delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), so it is especially important that this facet of research is understood and supported.

As with all our rankings, participation is voluntary, and we would like to thank all the universities that have contributed data for the first installation. We will be looking at the results carefully and will be taking feedback on how we can strengthen the analysis in future years.

Online Learning Rankings

Our second new initiative is our Online Learning Rankings, which will be published in December. In today’s post-Covid world, online learning has moved from being an experimental niche to a mainstream activity for many universities.

Attempting to measure this fast-moving part of the sector is, of course, challenging. As with all of our teaching-focused rankings, an important part of this will be to understand the opinions of students – something that is both exciting and technically difficult.

Data collection is completed and we are excited to see the first results.

Sub-Saharan Africa University Rankings

Our Sub-Saharan Africa University Rankings is entering its second iteration this year, with a 30 per cent growth on last year’s participation – part of an exciting wider growth in involvement from African institutions in all our rankings. The methodology has seen some changes following a consultation after the inaugural release.

Impact Rankings

The sixth edition of the Impact Rankings was launched in Bangkok in June, at the Global Sustainable Development Congress. We were delighted that the event was attended by more than 3,000 ­­­people and that the Impact Rankings have cemented themselves as the largest and most complete evaluation of higher education’s contribution to the UN SDGs.

Data collection for the 2025 edition is now open (it closes on 11 November) and we hope to continue to expand the rankings. Last year, we exceeded 2,000 universities for the first time, from 125 different countries and regions.

This year, we will be making the data collection process a little simpler, by reducing the number of pieces of evidence that are provided for each question from two to one. This will require us to split a small number of questions into two questions.

We will also be adding a new question that looks at how universities are assessing education for sustainability, although this won’t be scored as part of the ranking next year.

An exciting development that will be less visible to participants, but which will definitely help us as we scale up, is the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into our assessment process. This will support further consistency, as well as allowing us to focus our resources on quality assurance.

We are also planning on rolling out additional AI-supported aids for participating universities.

Duncan Ross is chief data officer at Times Higher Education.