Aims
The Citations per Faculty (CPF) indicator is a measure of the relative intensity and volume of research being done at an institution.
The indicator is a reflection of the volume of citations being achieved on average by an institution's academic staff. A higher volume of citations suggests that academics at those institutions are publishing in respected journals, engaging in strong collaboration and working on topics that merit a wide readership.
The citation count is divided by the number of individuals in the faculty in order to take into account different sizes of institution.
It forms part of the Research and Discovery lens.
Relevant Rankings
It forms part of the Research and Discovery lens.
Methodology
Below you can find the weighting(s) for the indicator. Weightings are reviewed on an annual basis.
| Ranking Project | Weighting |
| QS World University Rankings | 20% |
Data Sources
The data used for this indicator is drawn from Elsevier's Scopus research database. Scopus is a source-neutral abstract and citation database curated by independent subject matter experts.
An extract is provided to us in Q1 of each year which is used for the new cycle of each ranking, beginning with the World University Rankings.
For the calculation of Citations per Faculty, QS looks at the Citations count for six years for papers published over a five-year period.
Calculations
- The citation count is divided by the number of individuals in the faculty in order to take into account different sizes of institution.
- We then apply the following adjustments to the papers and citations we index.
- Paper-type exclusions - We exclude certain content types from our analysis. These types are defined by Elsevier Scopus. You can see the included and excluded types below under 'Definitions'.
- Self-citations exclusion - We exclude citation of an author’s own work by said author. We use an author-level definition of self-citations, as opposed to a journal-level or institution-level definition.
- Faculty area normalization - In the QS World University Rankings and QS University Rankings by Region), we equalize the influence of research in our five key faculty areas, so that each contributes 20% to the final indicator.
Definitions
Paper Definitions
We exclude certain content types from our analysis. These types are defined by Elsevier Scopus. You can see the included and excluded lists below.
| Included | Excluded |
| Article | Abstract Report |
| Review | Conference Review |
| Conference Paper | Editorial |
| Book | Erratum |
| Book Chapter | Letter |
| Article in Press | Note |
| Business Article | Press Release |
| Data Paper | Short Survey |
| Report | Undefined |
| Retracted |
