QS World University Rankings by Subject 2015 – challenges and developments

By Ben Sowter. From a certain perspective, the work we do at a discipline level ought to be easy. After all, we don’t seek data directly from institutions to compile our rankings by subject which removes a major data collection and validation overhead. However, the scale of the output, in our terms is vast. Our main ranking aggregates performance in 6 indicators for just over 800 institutions and thus comprises around 5,000 individual processed data points; by contrast our rankings by subject use up to four indicators in 36 subjects for up to 400 published results. All in all the full analysis involves well over 40,000 processed data points. More...