Imperial rises to 13th place in the THE World Reputation Rankings

In the recently released Times Higher Education (THE) World Rankings College was ranked one position higher than last year, coming at 13th. Imperial received an overall reputation score of 20.9, with a slightly higher score for research than teaching. In terms of UK institutions, Imperial came 3rd in the rankings, behind Cambridge and Oxford, who came 4th and 5th with rankings of 74.9 and 74.3 respectively.

The rankings are based on the “Academic Reputation Survey”, an invitation-only academic opinion survey available in 10 languages. The questionnaire was administered by Ipsos MediaCT for Thompson Reuters, the suppliers of the THE rankings data. The poll questioned experienced, published scholars about teaching and research within their field at universities they are familiar with. This was the 4th incarnation of the survey, receiving 10,536 responses from 133 countries, of which 22% were related to “engineering and technology” as well the social sciences.

The scores are based on the number of times an institution is said to be the best in it’s field by respondents, as a percentage of the number of times the top institution (Harvard) was mentioned. The scores for an institution overall are a result of the scores of it’s research and teaching combined at a ratio of 2:1, giving prominence to research.

The US has the most instutions in the THE World Rankings (46), followed by the UK with 10 and Germany with 6. Commiserations to our friends at UCL who dropped 5 places to 25th. -Ed.