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After more than two decades producing the ����Vlog World University Rankings, we are proud of the reputation we have built and the enormous global reach and influence of our rankings.

For universities, a strong ranking result attracts partnerships, investment and, crucially, academic and student talent. It can also bring greater global visibility and prestige.

With so much riding on the results of the rankings, it is right that universities scrutinise the criteria, methodologies and underlying data that produce their scores and their public ranking position. Indeed, ����Vlog (THE) encourages this, with an open, collaborative approach – and a series of tools to help universities benchmark against peers and turn the rankings data into actionable insights.

It is natural that success in rankings becomes part of a university’s strategic ambition. But sometimes that ambition can go too far.

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Sadly, there are cases in which a university’s focus on ranking positions becomes problematic: distorting missions to make the metrics not a means to an end, but rather an end in themselves; and, more rarely, leading to gaming and the manipulation of data to gain an unfair advantage in the league table.

As a responsible ranker, THE has a duty to ensure that success in our league tables is built on solid, long-term foundations; that it is based on reality – not on massaged or manipulated data, or cosmetic tricks.

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So, I can confirm that, as we announced in October 2025, we are moving forward with some modest methodological changes for the 2028 edition of the World University Rankings, to be published in the autumn of 2027. These adjustments will be subject to public scrutiny and debate before being officially confirmed next year, with enough advance notice to allow universities time to fully digest them before the launch of the 2028 ranking. But we can be clear that plans include:

Capping the number of institutional self-citations used in bibliometric analyses

We have always been upfront that self-citations of research papers can be entirely legitimate – signalling incremental, innovative and groundbreaking research – so we have rejected outright bans on self-citation, either personal or institutional self-citations. However, it is clear that self-citations can be, and are being, abused – examples include citation networks, sometimes referred to as citation cartels or clubs, gaming the bibliometric record, and cases of coercive citation, in which researchers are obliged to cite others’ work illegitimately.

We will move forward with a limit on institutional self-citations in our bibliometric analysis from the 2028 edition. In the coming months, we will provide more details about the proposed thresholds and calculation adjustments, and the rationale behind them.

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Recalibrating the ‘research quality’ metrics to reduce the influence of the ‘citation impact’ metric

When evaluating research quality, a basket of diverse metrics is the optimal approach. THE currently uses a group of four separate metrics to cover “research strength”, “research influence”, “research excellence” and, accorded the highest weight, “citation impact”.

All of these metrics (except research influence) draw on field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) in different ways, with the citation impact metric based on the mean FWCI of an institution’s publications. It measures the average – the mean – number of times a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally, normalised for each subject area, publication type and publication year, across 19.9 million publication outputs. Yet this metric, while widely trusted and used by THE for more than a decade, can be skewed by statistical outliers in universities with lower volumes of publication output, and can be vulnerable to active manipulation.

To clearly disincentivise the gaming of the citation impact indicator, we plan to reduce its influence in the rankings calculations and to increase the weight of the other three metrics, thus providing a more balanced and robust assessment of research quality.

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THE’s World University Rankings are renowned for being the most academically rigorous and robust of the global ranking systems.

These changes reflect our continuing commitment to securing the full trust of the sector, and to providing data and analyses that properly recognise the high stakes placed on our rankings worldwide.

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phil.baty@timeshighereducation.com