THE World Reputation Rankings place Imperial 14th
Carol Ann Cheah examines the table, which is compiled from an invitation-only survey
In the latest release of the Times Higher Education (THE) World Reputation Rankings, Imperial College London dropped one place from 13th in 2014 to 14th in 2015. The THE World Reputation Rankings are a spin-off supplement from the internationally acclaimed THE World University Rankings, where Imperial currently retains its strong top 10 position.
While the World University Rankings utilize 13 separate performance indicators grouped under five categories: teaching (30%), research (30%), citations (30%), industry income (2.5%) and international outlook (7.5%), the World Reputation Rankings are formed using a large invitation-only academic survey, which took place at the end of 2014 and saw tens of thousands of responses.
Barring the University of Tokyo (12th), ETH Zurich (15th) and the University of Toronto (16th), the top 20 places in the Reputation Rankings are chiefly occupied by American universities, with British institutions taking 4 out of the 20 spots. Harvard University regularly tops the list; this year it was followed by both Cambridge and Oxford, which came in 2nd and 3rd respectively.
According to THE, the World Reputation Rankings are “based on nothing more than subjective judgement – but it is considered the expert judgement of senior, published academics, the people best placed to know the most about excellence in our universities”.
Institutions are not allowed to nominate survey participants, and no one is allowed to sign up for the survey without an invitation, thus meaning that selected participants are representing thousands of their peers.
This year’s survey is set to play a key part in shaping the 2015-2016 edition of the World University Rankings, alongside a number of other reforms. THE will be releasing the survey in 15 languages (Arabic, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, South American Spanish, Italian, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Russian and English), an increase from the 9 used in the last survey.
In addition, where the survey was previously outsourced to Thomson Reuters, THE is now seeking to take full responsibility and ownership of the survey and its data, with distribution being carried out in partnership with Elsevier. THE claims that this extra control will allow it to “publish more detailed profiles of institutional reputation globally and to be more responsive to the sector’s data needs.”
Phil Baty, editor of the THE World University Rankings, said the following: “We would like to thank in advance all scholars who will be helping us to create this rich and important picture of global higher education.
By lending a small amount of their precious time, and – more importantly – by lending their expertise, they will become part of an extraordinary global research project that will shape the THE rankings and wider performance metrics”.
