For the calculation of Citations per Faculty, Citations per Paper, Paper per Faculty, H Index and International Research Network indicator, QS gathers two distinct datasets: citations count for six years for papers published over a five-year period.
We collect data on research publications and citations from our partners at Elsevier Scopus. 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 Ranking. You can read more on Elsevier's page at Elsevier Scopus and Rankings
Adjustments
We apply the following significant adjustments to the papers and citations we index.
1. Affiliation Cap.
Affiliation caps screen out papers with more than a given number of institutional affiliations from all bibliometric analysis. The cap is variable and calculated individually for each subject, ensuring no more than 0.1% (0.001) of research is excluded in a given field.
For example, for Agriculture (AGR01), we may exclude all papers with more than 20 co-authoring institutions resulting 1140 papers, accounting for 0.1% of that subject overall. This may differ from Anthropology (ANT01) where the affiliation cap is only 11 co-authoring institutions and only 62 papers, but results in the same 0.1% exclusion criteria.
To view the current affiliation caps by subject, please click here. This year it represented around 1.41% of the database and prevents highly cited material produced by very large research groups conferring too much credit on institutions who have only contributed in very small part to the work. Whilst often high-profile and important research, these papers often cause distortion for a university that may not especially research-active otherwise.
2. Paper-type exclusions. See here.
3. Self-citations exclusion. We use author-level definition of self-citations, as opposed to journal-level or institution-level definition (https://www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence/resource-library/research-metrics-guidebook).
4. Faculty Area Normalization (only in QS World University Rankings and QS University Rankings by Region). Due to publishing patterns and practices, a straight ratio of citations per faculty, citations per paper or papers to faculty places a strong emphasis on life sciences and medicine, as well as on natural sciences. In consultation with advisors and participants, QS has opted to adopt a model which aims to equalize the influence of research in our five key faculty areas. A more detailed technical explanation of how this works can be found here.
Please refer to our QS Scopus User Guide in order to know hot to interpret various research counts provided for institutions.