How is the ranking done?

The 2017 version of ITU-QRR provides the key quality dimensions of research performance by more than 450 universities and institutes of the Muslim World, using Scopus database.

How we measure quality?

The publications in Top 5 percentile of Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) of journals and conferences in each disciplinary category are taken as Highest Quality Publications; publications in Top 10 percentile of Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) of journals and conferences in each disciplinary category are taken as High Quality Publications; and publications in Top 50 percentile of Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) of journals and conferences in each disciplinary category are taken as Medium Quality Publications. In addition, the ranked outlets A* and A from ERA CORE 2014 is also used to assess publication quality, URL: CORE Rankings

What is SNIP?

SNIP is journal impact factor like indicator but it normalizes citation potential across the fields {Moed (2010); Waltman et al. (2013)}

What is research active institute?

An institute is considered research active if it has more than 50 publications in a given discipline in 6 years time window

What are Broad Institutions?

Institutes that are research active in more than 8 disciplines.

What are Specialized Institutions?

Institutes that are research active between 3 to 8 disciplines.

What is the time window of ITU-QRR 2017?

ITU-QRR uses 6 years time window i.e. 2010-2015.

Method

The 2017 ITU Research Rankings provide the rating in two ways: by subject area and university overall. Keeping in mind that the 2017 version of ITU Research Rankings focuses to provide the key quality dimension of research performance, thus, the publications in top quality venues are considered to rate universities and institutes. Subject Area wise Ranking: Subject areas are organized into a hierarchy with 15 level-1 categories and 250 level-2 categories. The ratings can be carried out in any subject category at any level. The rating results show total publication output during 2010-2015 and their proportion in top quality venues. The results are sorted based the volume of High Quality publications. Overall Ranking: The overall rating provides a measure of the comprehensiveness of research strengths across all subject categories.

Data

The ITU Quality Research Ranking for Muslim World does not simply take into account all publications in Scopus. Instead, the ranking is based on selected sub-set of publications that must satisfy the following criteria:

• The publication has been written in English.
• The publication has one or more authors. (Anonymous publications are not allowed.)
• The publication has not been retracted.
• In addition ITU-QRR also include the journals and conferences included in Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia.

In the calculation of the indicators, only the selected sub-set of publications is included. Thus, the ITU-QRR is based on a relatively homogeneous set of publications, namely publications in international scientific journals in fields that are suitable for citation analysis.

Affiliation Grouping

In Scopus database, multiple affiliations may belong to a single university. Therefore, a comprehensive vetting process is executed to group these affiliations in order to procure publications belonging to a university. In addition, university hospitals that are not controlled or owned by a given university are considered as separate entity.

Fields

The 2017 release covers 16 broad disciplinary areas (that groups 25 ASJC top level disciplines) and 250 niche disciplinary areas Each publication of a university belongs to one, or sometimes to more than one, of the above broad fields. If a publication belongs to more than one broad field, the publication is assigned fractionally to each of the broad fields. For instance, a publication belonging to three broad fields is assigned to each of the fields with a weight of 1 / 3 = 0.33.

General (Science, Nature, PNAS)

This is a special category that indexes journals and conferences related to multi-disciplinary fields. We treat this field differently by only considering Science, Nature and PNAS as Highest Quality publication venues.

Indicators

The ITU-QRR utilizes fractional counting method incase of multiple authors collaborating for a given publication. Thus, publications authored by multiple authors will be normalized by the number of affiliations - for instance, if a paper is authored by 5 researchers from 3 different institutes, with two authors participating from two institutes then their fractional count would be as follows: Univ1 = 1/3, Univ2 = 1/3 and Univ3=1/3.

Quality Indicators

The following indicators of scientific quality are provided in the ITU-QRR:

• Highest Quality Publications: The number and the proportion of a university’s publications that, compared with other publications in the same field and in the same year, belong to the top 5% source titles. In addition, the ranked outlets A* and A from ERA CORE 2014 is also used to assess publication quality
• High Quality Publications: The number and the proportion of a university’s publications that, compared with other publications in the same field and in the same year, belong to the top 1% source titles. In addition, the ranked outlets A* and A from ERA CORE 2014 is also used to assess publication quality
• Medium Quality Publications: The number and the proportion of a university’s publications that, compared with other publications in the same field and in the same year, belong to the top 50% source titles. In addition, the ranked outlets A* and A from ERA CORE 2014 is also used to assess publication quality

Collaboration Indicators

The following indicators of scientific collaboration are provided in the ITU-QRR:

• Multi-Institutional Collaborations: The number and the proportion of a university’s publications that have been co-authored with one or more other organizations.
• International Collaborations: The number and the proportion of a university’s publications that have been co-authored by two or more countries.

Scope

• Institute Coverage: The 2017 release covers more than 450 universities and institutes of the Muslim World.
• Subject Areas: The 2017 release covers established disciplines, organized into a hierarchy of 16 top-level disciplinary categories and 251 second level categories. Click here.
• Years: The 2017 release uses Scopus publication and citation data in the time window 2010 - 2015 and presents a snapshot of university performance within that window. For subsequent releases the window will slide forward and provide additional data points so that users will be able to track changes in research performance over time.
• Data: Bibliometric data is taken from Elsevier's Scopus database, URL: Scopus

List of world class universities for benchmarking

The 2017 version of ITU - QRR uses the following universities to benchmark research performance:

• Harvard University, USA
• University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Massachusetts institute of Technology (MIT), USA
• University of Cambridge, UK
• University College London, UK
• Tsinghua University, China
• University of Tokyo, Japan
• National Taiwan University (NTU), Taiwan
• National University of Singapore, Singapore
• KAIST- Korean Advance Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea
• Seoul National University, South Korea
• Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, India
• Mahidol University, Thailand