QS Changes its Ranking Methodology

Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) has released the twelfth edition of its World University Rankings. This year there were significant methodological changes that have apparently been under consideration for several months. The first change was to move towards a moderate form of field normalisation of citation data. QS has long been aware that the Scopus database that provides publication and citation data is seriously biased towards the natural sciences and medicine while engineering, the social sciences and the arts and humanities are comparatively underrepresented. More...