Article: Oxford ranked best university in the world; European nations slip down league table

You wouldn't recognize.



There's also a Dutch or Belgian one on research and a French one on employment. Your ignorance doesn't really say anything about the tables.

If people are sceptical of US News because of that, then people should be even more sceptical of QS and Times since not only are they British, they are the only publications that rank UK universities particularly high (US universities are high everywhere).

At least QS and Times actually publish their methodology for transparency so that someone can use that mechanism themselves to accurately ranked them based on those weightings. US News don't do this. Why? Probably because it's ****. How else would UCB beat Cambridge? THE and QS rank UK universities highly, because on those weightings, for those criteria, they are better than most. They don't do it just because they love the U.K.

US News explain their methodology here.
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/articles/methodology

It seems they merge data from Thomson Reuters surveys and data mining and Web of Science Bibliometric. QS use surveys and Scopus instead of Web of Science. (http://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings/methodology) Superficially at least, they sound fairly similar, but I guess you have to get into how accurate and objective you think their various data sets and surveys are.

What do you mean by that?

Ah I see. When I typed it in on Google, I found a Quora post that stated they didn't publicise their methodology. I'd imagine foreign intake in America would be greater and hence lead to the rankings being skewed.

People get confused by what it is, even academics at Oxford.

Huh?

People on TSR for some reason like you use foreign intake to delegitimize rankings that they don't personally agree with, but in that link you can see US News has 0% on foreign intake (international collaboration means researchers working with someone in another country, and in fact American universities would be disadvantaged in that because they are a bigger country with many very good universities).

If US News was "skewed", then it's only the fact that the government funds doctorates a lot more and their universities focus on grad school a lot more, as there's 10% on PhDs granted. At the same time, US News doesn't consider graduate outcome.

Surely graduate outcomes is a pretty significant factor to be left out, considering that many of us actually go to university to have good employment prospects. I suppose it accounts for ICL and UCL's lower positions, since being in London probably bolsters there outcomes. There are other ranking systems that also credit Nobel prizes and fields medals and that generally tends to cater to more science focused universities. I think that's how MIT ranked well on QS/THE since it has huge scientific pedigree.

I've never even heard of ARWU.

You might of heard of it as the Shanghai Ranking. Has Cambridge 4th and Oxford 7th @Fullofsurprises