QS World University Rankings

QS World University Rankings is an annual publication of university rankings by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) in partnership with ELSEVIER. Previously known as THE-QS World University Rankings, QS had collaborated with Times Higher Education (THE) magazine to publish its international league tables from 2004 to 2009 before both of them started to announce their own versions.

The primary aim of the QS World University Rankings is to help students make informed comparisons of leading universities around the world. Based on six performance indicators, the rankings are designed to assess universities in four areas: research, teaching, employability and internationalization.

QS releases an annual report that classifies more than 30 thousand universities around the world arranged by academic and scientific standards.

Many universities in the world have praised this assessment, which has become a measure followed by universities to improve their performance.

The University in QS Ranking

QS Arab World

QS Sustainability

---

QS Methodology

The methodology for the QS World University Rankings: Arab Region differs from the global ranking, using different indicators and changing the weighting of existing indicators. The research excellence element, that exists in all of our regional rankings, is based on data from Scopus, the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed academic literature.

QS has undertaken extensive consultation with university leaders in the region to identify a suitable methodology – over 100 academics attended a QS methodology fact-finding meeting in Abu Dhabi in May 2014.

In the 2019 edition, we added an additional indicator, International Research Network, making it ten indicators overall.

Indicators

• Academic Reputation from Global Survey 30%
• Employer Reputation from Global Survey 20%
• Faculty Student Ratio 15%
• International Research Network Index 10%
• Web Impact from Webometrics 5%
• Proportion of Staff with PhD 5%
• Citations per Paper from Scopus 5%
• Papers per Faculty from Scopus 5%
• Proportion of International Students 2.5%
• Proportion of International Faculty 2.5%