In 2017 Global Ranking of Academic Subjects, institutions are ranked in 52 subjects across natural sciences, engineering, life sciences, medical sciences, and social sciences.To be included in a subject ranking, the universities need to have a minimum number of research publications during the period of 2011-2015. The publication threshold is different for different subjects. Bibliometric data are collected from InCites. Web of Science categories are mapped to 52 academic subjects.
ARWU considers every university that has any Nobel Laureates, Fields Medalists, Highly Cited Researchers, or papers published in Nature or Science. In addition, universities with significant amount of papers indexed by Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) are also included. In total, more than 1300 universities are actually ranked and the best 500 are published. From 2017, those universities ranked between 501 and 800 are also published as ARWU World Top 500 Candidates.
Universities are ranked by several indicators of academic or research performance, including alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, highly cited researchers, papers published in Nature and Science, papers indexed in major citation indices, and the per capita academic performance of an institution. For each indicator, the highest scoring institution is assigned a score of 100, and other institutions are calculated as a percentage of the top score. The d...