Anonymous wrote:These are not the best colleges in the world, they are the best *research universities.* This is about graduate research, not about the undergraduate experience. That's why no SLAC, no matter how fine, will be on the list--they have no graduate students. And size of university is crucially important. The rankings are based on:
Global research reputation
Regional research reputation
total number of publications
total number of books
total number of conferences
Normalized citation impact
Total citations
Number of publications that are among the 10 percent most cited
Percentage of total publications that are among the 10 percent most cited
International collaboration
Number of Ph.D.s awarded
Number of Ph.D.s awarded per academic staff member
Any ranking based on the *number* of whatever will naturally give a large advantage to big universities over smaller ones.
Frankly, I find this ranking not the least bit interesting or useful, but YMMV.
This ranking is much better than the one based on size of the endowments or alumni contributions.