International Research Network (Indicator)

International Research Network (IRN) measures an institution’s success in building and sustaining research partnerships with organisations in other countries and territories. It considers both the geographic diversity of an institution’s collaborators and the depth of those relationships. To focus on meaningful collaboration rather than one-off activity, a partnership is counted only where it produces at least three joint papers within a five-year period.

International research networks enable institutions to exchange expertise, share resources and address questions that extend beyond national boundaries. Within a ranking, the indicator distinguishes institutions whose international engagement is embedded in sustained research activity from those with a narrower or more occasional pattern of collaboration. It considers partnerships with all entities represented in Elsevier’s Scopus database, not only higher education institutions included in QS rankings.

The indicator uses publication affiliation data from Scopus to identify an institution’s international research partners and the countries or territories they represent. Scores are calculated separately across five faculty areas: Arts and Humanities; Engineering and Technology; Life Sciences and Medicine; Natural Sciences; and Social Sciences and Management. Within each area, the number of locations represented is assessed in relation to the number of partners, before the results are normalised, averaged and rescaled to produce the final score.

By assessing performance across broad faculty areas, IRN recognises that patterns of collaboration differ between disciplines. Research is assigned to subject areas using Scopus’s All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes, while relevant publication types are included and affiliation caps are applied to reduce distortion from papers involving exceptionally large numbers of institutions. This creates a consistent basis for comparing the breadth and continuity of international research networks.

IRN primarily relates to the themes of global engagement, international research and institutional partnerships. A high score indicates that an institution has developed a geographically diverse network supported by repeated research collaboration, rather than relying on a small number of isolated international connections. The indicator also touches on research capacity and the ability to participate in sustained international knowledge exchange.

The indicator complements measures of international faculty, international students and student mobility by examining internationalisation through research relationships. It also complements research indicators such as Academic Reputation, Citations per Faculty, Citations per Paper and Papers per Faculty: these assess research standing, impact or volume, whereas IRN focuses on the structure, diversity and continuity of the collaborative network through which research is produced.