QS World University Ranking

Since 2004, the QS World University Ranking evaluates the universities of the world based on six indexes and introduces the top 700 universities. In this regard, the most important evaluation indexes include university credibility, employee credibility, student to faculty members ratio, citations per faculty member, number of international faculty members, and number of international students. The information required by this ranking system is collected through a survey of subject area experts, a survey of employers, Scopus Citation Database, and questionnaires filled by universities.

1. University credibility: the qualitative index is based on the opinion of the experts receiving the highest scores. Surveys are filled by subject area experts regarding universities’ credibility in their specialty field. In total, 74651 experts of universities participated in QS World University Ranking of 2016-2017 (40% weight)

2. Employee credibility: assessing the employers' view of the work quality of graduates of each university (10% weight)

3. The student to faculty members ratio: this index assesses the education quality of universities and time dedicated to each student by each faculty member (20% weight).

4. Citations per faculty member: this index is used to evaluate the research impact of universities. Information related to citations received by each university in the past five years are extracted from Scopus Citation Database, and citations per faculty member are estimated instead of the total citation rate of the university in order to conduct a fair assessment. The weight of this index in the overall evaluation is 20%.

5. A number of international faculty members and the number of international students: these two indexes are used to assess the success rate of a university in terms of attracting international students and faculty members (10% weight).