Times Higher Education (THE) and Elsevier have announced a partnership to provide the data behind the THE's flagship World University Rankings and its global university performance analyses.
The methodology of the global rankings will be broadly preserved. The rankings will continue to use the most comprehensive and balanced performance indicators to evaluate universities across all of their core missions, including research, knowledge transfer, international outlook, and - uniquely - the teaching environment.
However, research publication data will now be drawn from Elsevier's Scopus database. Scopus claims to be the world's largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed academic literature. With this data source, THE will be able to analyse more research activity from a greater number of institutions, including those institutions from emerging economies that account for a growing portion of research. THE will also use SciVal, Elsevier's research metrics analysis tool, to continue to innovate its research performance metrics and analysis.
Going forward, all institutional data collection, previously outsourced to Thomson Reuters, will be expanded and carried out by a dedicated team of data analysts at THE. This will underpin the THE World University Rankings, as well as supplementary rankings such as the THE 100 Under 50, the THE Asia Rankings and the THE BRICS & Emerging Economies Rankings (from 2015).
THE and Elsevier also launched the annual global academic reputation survey. This survey provides data for the World University Rankings and the World Reputation Rankings, to provide the most detailed picture yet of the world's leading universities, judged by those who best understand excellence in teaching and research: the scholars themselves.
