Separately to research partnerships with academic institutions (see IRN Index), QS examines how higher education institutions (HEI) partner with the businesses (non-HEI).
For this we identify on Scopus publications сo-authored with the biggest global companies (as per Forbes "The Global 2000" list). We consider only partnerships, resulted in at least 2 joint papers in the past 5 years. As in other cases when citations and papers are processed, only relevant paper types are considered and our usual affiliation cap is applied. However, no normalisation by faculty area is conducted as in our other employment-focused indicators.
The number of distinct companies per institutions is normalised and scored for the purpose of this indicator. The indicator is part of QS Graduate Employability Rankings and QS World University Rankings in Sustainability.