2016年3月22日，QS发布最新世界大学专业排名，为各位准备申请的伙伴提供参考。新东方网留学频道在此与大家分享2016世界大学专业排名的算法。
The QS World University Rankings by Subject for 2016 cover more ground than last year, and do so in a more systematic way. As in 2015, we are adding six new disciplines this year. This year, they are Anthropology, Archaeology, Engineering – Mineral & Mining, Nursing, Performing Arts, and Social Policy & Administration. It will never be possible for us to analyse every subject offered by universities across the world. But the 42 subjects we now cover take in the vast majority of academic life, whether you count it in terms of student numbers, staff numbers, or research activity.
As in previous years, the ranking for each subject we list is compiled on the basis of up to four measures. Two of these, academic and employer opinion, are used in all of our subject rankings, and in the overall QS World University Rankings. They are based on our surveys of academics and employers around the world. This year’s surveys account for the informed view of over 121,000 people, including 77,000 academics and 44,000 employers.
Our academic experts are asked for the subjects in which they have attained expertise, and then which universities are the best in the world in that subject. They can pick up to 30 from a dropdown list, but cannot choose their own institution. For the employers, we simply ask where the good recruits come from. But here, there is a caveat to the methodology. If a firm hires only electrical engineers, for example, we weight its opinion of electrical engineers more heavily than if they hire any type of graduate. We give an intermediate weighting to their opinion if electrical engineering is one of a range of disciplines whose graduates they recruit.
The other two measures are concerned with research, and specifically with the publication rates and impact of an institution’s research. Both are derived from the Scopus database run by scientific publishing experts Elsevier, and cover a five-year time interval. The first measures the citations of papers for each subject from each university over that period, an acknowledged indicator of research influence.
The final measure is each university’s H-index for each subject. This indicator is intended to capture the institution’s breadth of research as well as its quality. If a university has 19 chemistry papers over five years with 19 or more citations each, its H Index for chemistry is 19.
Different academic subjects each have their own publishing culture, and the way in which we use these indicators varies to reflect this reality. In Medicine, the most publish-or-perish of all disciplines, we use citations and the H Index to account for 25 per cent each of a university’s possible score. We count citations data on more than five million papers in our medical ranking, by some distance the biggest paper count for any of our 42 subjects. But we have data on only 120,000 published papers concerned with History. So here, the citations and H Index count for only 15 per cent each. And there are other subjects such as Art & Design, for which there are too few papers for statistical significance. Here we draw up the ranking solely on the basis of employer and academic opinion.
The 42 subjects ranked in our 2016 ranking vary vastly in terms of the shadow they cast on the academic scene. In their very different ways, Physics and Economics both feature in the offerings of any full-service university. That is why we rank 400 universities in physics, and a lesser but still impressive 300 for Economics and Econometrics. We can reach this level of precision because there are many employers and academics who know about Physics and Economics departments, and there are enough papers and citations to allow a deep analysis of publishing impact in these subjects. In other areas there may be fewer departments, fewer informed observers, and fewer publications. An example is the important but niche subject of Architecture & Built Environment. Here we publish only the top 100 institutions, with the 51-100 group undifferentiated in rank.
The 99.9% solution
As well the new subjects that they include, there is one further significant improvement to the 2016 QS World University Rankings by Subject. It relates to the way in which they deal with the small number of papers whose authors are drawn from an exceptionally large number of institutions. These papers often come from big-science subject areas such as high-energy physics, cosmology or genomics. It is certain that the observation of gravitational waves reported in February 2016 will generate many such papers.
The problem from our point of view is that giving each institution named on each such paper full credit for its content risks giving even these important papers too big a slice of the overall citations pie. At the same time, it is not practical to give each institution a share of the credit. Doing that would discourage research cooperation among small and large groups alike.
The solution we have adopted, with the support of the Global Academic Advisory Board for the Rankings, is to omit from our calculations any paper with more than 99.9 per cent of the average number of institutional affiliations for that subject. (Remember that we are counting institutions, not authors. Ours is a ranking of universities, not of people.) This replaces our previous system of omitting all papers with more than ten institutional affiliations, which unfairly penalised a small number of big-science subjects. It resulted in the omission of 37,000 papers in Medicine and exactly three in Accounting & Finance.
Six new subjects
Our six new subjects for 2016 come from across the academic spectrum. At one extreme is Engineering – Mineral & Mining, the sixth technology discipline in our ranking. This subject intersects with others that we have covered from Year One of these rankings. Civil engineering departments are often involved in mining, while chemical and process engineering is closely related to minerals treatment. However, it exists as a discrete discipline as well. For example, the Royal School of Mines was one of the founding institutions of Imperial College London, which is seventh in this ranking over a century later.
Next come Anthropology and Archaeology, two related subjects concerned with the past and present of the human race. These disciplines both attract big public interest as well as being of academic importance, and have become closer in methodology to the sciences in recent years. Because they have only limited employment and publication footprints, academic opinion counts for 70 per cent of each university’s possible score for each of these subjects, and we publish only the top 100 universities for each.
Social Policy & Administration is one of a group of subjects ranked here which feeds a specific professional path, that of public administration. So we have counted employer opinion for 20 per cent of a possible score in this ranking.
The addition of Nursing brings to six the number of biomedical disciplines we cover. It naturally involves large numbers of students, and the amount of published research in the field has grown apace in recent years.
Our sixth and last new subject for 2016 is also the one with the most star quality. It is Performing Arts. The institutions we list mostly deal in both music and drama, as well as other smaller subject areas such as dance. So it brings in colleges that would never feature in a mainstream university ranking. Seven of the top ten are not universities, including number 1, the Julliard School in New York. Because this is a teaching-intensive subject area in which the experts tend to be performers rather than researchers, we use academic and employer opinion, but not H Index or citations, to compile this ranking.
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