Institutions featured
This year’s table features 980 institutions, 959 of which qualify for an overall rank. 46 new institutions feature for the first time in the 2018 edition. To arrive at this final table, 4,388 institutions were considered.
Presentation changes
Institutions are presented in rank order to 400, then in groups of 10 to 500 (e.g. 401-410), in groups of 50 to 800 (extended from 700 last year) and then in a final 801-1000 range. It is not correct to surmise that institutions presented in the 701+ range in last year's ranking but the 801-1000 range this year, have necessarily dropped 100 places.
Methodological refinements
QS is constantly refining its data definitions and methods in order to provide the clearest and most reliable measure of university performance against our selected metrics. This year, in response to an extended list of universities and growing survey penetration amongst smaller employers, the weighting of employer responses has been adjusted to place greater emphasis on the viewpoint of domestic employers; and the period in which citations are accrued for research has been extended. You can find more details on these adjustments here. These adjustments will be comparatively minor for most institutions but may render year on year comparisons somewhat misleading.
Guidance for use
Universities are multi-faceted organisations and many of their strengths cannot be covered by any ranking. Selecting a university is a complex and influential decision and placing too much blind faith in the results of any ranking is likely to result in important factors to you being overlooked. Furthermore, the relative weighting of factors used to present the table is just one perspective on the relative importance of our indicators – and it’s not YOUR perspective. We recommend you use the rankings to shortlist, or inform your choices, but ensure you conduct your own thorough research too – particularly into aspects not covered by the ranking. If you want to build your own version of our ranking, or combine these results with subject performance, please download our app. For some independent advice on how best to make use of rankings consider downloading the IREG Guidelines for Stakeholders of Academic Rankings.
Notes
Chung-Ang University (South Korea) has been listed as unranked overall (from a position of 386 in the last edition) due to irregularities in survey returns posted on their behalf.
In advance of the publication of the QS World University Rankings 2018, during routine screening of our survey responses, we discovered a substantial number of anomalous responses lodged in favour of Chung-Ang University. We contacted the university to discover that they were as surprised as we were. To their great credit, they have cooperated fully with our investigation into the matter and with their help we have been able to identify that an unsanctioned undertaking to lodge a large number of false responses in favour of their university had originated from their campus. Whilst an increasingly sophisticated array of techniques are now routinely deployed to detect and eliminate such influences on our surveys, such attempts to manipulate the outcomes of our research – whether officially sanctioned or otherwise – cannot be tolerated.
As a result of these irregularities, Chung-Ang University has been listed as unranked in the QS World University Rankings 2018. Institutions in this category do not receive overall scores or ranks from QS. This institution will also be unranked in other rankings that draw on these survey data for the 2018 cycle. Assuming no further irregularities occur, they will be reinstated for the 2019 edition. This consequence has been arrived at in close consultation with our international academic advisory board.
