The selection of universities in this ranking system was modified in the year of 2024. NTU Rankings were announced by each of the following ranking programs ARWU, QS, THE, and U.S. News, as well as the Essential Science Indicators (ESI). When the ranking launched in 2007, NTU Rankings included the top 1,200 universities based on the research productivity and impact, namely number of published journal articles and number of citations gained, then the list of candidate universities was against the World University ranking systems to finalize the universities would be included in NTU Rankings. The list is reviewed annually to ensure the comprehensiveness of the rankings. For 2024, 1,561 universities are included in NTU Rankings 2024.

 

 

 

The concept of authority control was employed to retrieve data indexed under different forms of a university’s name in the aforementioned databases – i.e. the official name, the abbreviated name, and other possible forms of the name. This ranking system also considered the merging and splitting of universities (or different campuses in a university system) and included publications by university-affiliated institutions such as research centers and university hospitals. This effort ensured the accuracy of each university’s number of published journal articles and the subsequent citation statistics.

 

This ranking system addressed the flaw caused by the classification of institution in ESI. Some university systems have several campuses. A few campuses within a particular university system may have been commonly perceived as individual institutions. However, they are indexed in ESI only by the name of the university system. For example, the University of Connecticut system includes the main campus in Storrs and five regional campuses throughout the state. Furthermore, it also contains the Schools of Medicine and Dental Medicine at UConn Health in Farmington. These are all indexed under “University of Connecticut” in ESI.

 

This ranking system rectified this flaw by manually searching SCI/SSCI and to identify the actual number of articles produced by the individual campuses, as well as the citations of those articles. Likewise, this ranking system employed the same manual searching procedures to ensure that the measurement of each university’s Highly Cited Papers fairly represented the research performance of the individual campuses.