Posted by International comparisons of institutions are displayed in the tenth annual U.S. News & World Report Best Global Institutions rankings. These rankings, which only consider an institution’s overall academic research and reputations rather than its particular undergraduate or graduate programs, can help applicants compare universities around the world because more and more students are enrolling in universities outside of their home countries.
The 2024–2025 Best Global Institutions rankings also include the foreign rankings of American universities, which U.S. News has independently ranked for more than 40 years. All universities have the ability to assess themselves against institutions in their own nation and region, raise their profile among international educators, and find prestigious institutions abroad with which to partner.
Please bear in mind that a school’s Best Global Universities rating should be one of the factors considered when deciding where to apply. The rankings reflect academic research and reputation, but personal factors like as location, campus atmosphere, strength of certain programs, and cost are all major considerations.
The aggregate ranking includes 2,250 outstanding institutions, up from 2,000 in the previous ranking, distributed over 104 countries (up from 95). The Clarivate™-powered rankings began with the creation of a pool of 2,271 institutions. The top 2,250 schools were then ranked.
U.S. News initially compiled the top 250 colleges from Clarivate’s worldwide reputation study, which is detailed below, to produce the pool of 2,271. Any other organizations that satisfied the minimal requirement of at least 1,250 publications published between 2018 and 2022 were then included by U.S. News. The previous ranking’s paper criterion has not altered. The final 2024–2025 ranking pool of 2,271 colleges was produced using those two criteria, and U.S. News rated the 2,250 universities that scored the highest overall.
Due to these requirements, a large number of independent graduate institutions were included in the ranking universe and qualified for ranking, such as the University of California, San Francisco, and Rockefeller University in New York.
The rankings were then calculated using the 13 variables and weights that U.S. News used to assess worldwide research performance. Each school’s profile page on usnews.com includes its total worldwide score as well as numerical rankings for the 13 categories, allowing students to compare each school’s performance in each category.
The ranking formula’s indicators and weights are presented in the table below, with relevant indicators grouped together; an explanation is provided for each.
Reputation Indicators
The two reputation indices included in U.S. News’ ranking study were developed using data from Clarivate’s Academic Reputation Survey, which was aggregated for the most recent five years, from 2019 to 2023.
In order to provide a complete picture of academics’ perceptions of universities throughout the world, the poll asked participants to rate programs in the fields they were familiar with. A more precise and accurate assessment of a university’s overall reputation was produced by this technique, which enabled respondents to score institutions at the subject and department level as opposed to the institution level.
Clarivate made measures to address linguistic bias, varying response rates, and the geographic dispersion of researchers in order to fairly represent all areas. Among these actions were:
- An invitation-only survey will be sent to academics selected from Clarivate’s published research databases, based on UNESCO’s projected geographic populations of academics and researchers worldwide.
- Accessible in seven different languages.
- To account for differences in response rates between UNESCO geographic areas, the survey’s final results were rebalanced based on researcher geographic dispersion.
- Excluding respondents’ nominations for their own university or alma mater.
- Respondents also self-declared their employment function largely in academia (about 3% of respondents were not now employed by an institution):
- 65% academic staff
- 14% research staff
- 7% graduate/post graduate students
- 7% senior institutional leaders
- 2% teaching staff
- 1% management and administrative staff
- 1% other positions
The total number of respondents was 28,666, broken down by year:
- 2019: 6,307
- 2020: 7,712
- 2021: 3,702
- 2022: 4,381
- 2023: 6,564
An estimated 20% of responders are repeated from one year to the next.
The following two distinct ranking indicators were derived from the survey findings.
Global research reputation (12.5%): The findings of the Academic Reputation Survey for the top five research universities worldwide are combined to create this measure.
Regional research reputation (12.5%): This measure is based on the sum of the Academic Reputation Survey findings for the last five years for the top research universities in the region; regions were defined according to the U.N. Statistics Division.
This geographical component considerably boosted the worldwide variety of the rankings by assessing professors’ perceptions of other institutions in their region. The U.S. News rankings are the only worldwide rankings that include this statistic, and the 2024-2025 edition marks the tenth year of its usage.
Bibliometric Indicators
The bibliometric metrics included in the ranking study by U.S. News are derived from Clarivate’s Web of Science data for the 2018–2022 timeframe. More than 22,000 of the most prestigious and prominent academic publications in the social sciences, arts, and humanities are covered by the Web of Science, an online research platform. The Web of Science is an interdisciplinary resource that includes carefully chosen, peer-reviewed publications, despite its name.
Publications (10%): Based on the total number of academic papers—reviews, articles, and notes—that have university affiliations and are published in prestigious, influential journals, this indicator shows how productive an institution is overall in its research.
This factor is strongly related to the university’s size. It is also impacted by the university’s subject specialization, as certain fields, notably medicine, publish more frequently than others.
Books (2.5%): Books are a key mode of publication for academic study, especially in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. This ranking indication complements article data and better depicts colleges that specialize in social sciences, arts, and humanities.
Conferences (2.5%): Academic conferences are an essential platform for academic exchange, especially in engineering and computer science fields. The formal publication of conference proceedings can reflect significant scientific discoveries in certain disciplines that have not been recorded or published elsewhere.
NCI, or normalized citation impact, is 10%. Regardless of the size or age of the institution, the total number of citations per article indicates the overall effect of the study; the figure is normalized to account for variations in the research field, the year of publication, and the kind of publishing.
Numerous research review organizations throughout the world employ NCI, which is regarded as one of the fundamental metrics of research performance. Clarivate, which assists institutions in assessing research output, performance, and trends; comprehending the extent of an organization’s intellectual contributions; and articulating findings to guide research goals, provided the topic fields utilized in the analysis. Clarivate makes advantage of the Web of Science’s citation and content indicators.
Number of publications that are among the 10% most cited (12.5%): This indicator reflects the number of papers that have been assigned as being in the top 10% of the most highly cited papers in the world for their respective fields. Each paper is given a percentile score that represents where it falls, in terms of citation rank, compared with similar papers – those with the same publication year, subject and document type. Since the number of highly cited papers is dependent on the university’s size, this can be considered a robust indication of how much excellent research the university produces.
Percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited (10%): This indicator is the percentage of a university’s total papers that are among the top 10% of the most highly cited papers in the world – per field and publication year. It is a measure of the amount of excellent research the university produces and is independent of the university’s size.
International collaboration – relative to country (5%): This indicator is the proportion of the institution’s total papers that contain international coauthors divided by the proportion of internationally coauthored papers for the country that the university is in. It shows how international the research papers are compared with the country in which the institution is based. International collaborative papers are considered an indicator of quality, since only the best research attracts international collaborators.
International collaboration (5%): This indicator is the proportion of the institution’s total papers that contain international coauthors and is another measure of quality.
Scientific Excellence Indicators
Number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited in their respective field (5%): This indicator shows the volume of papers classified as highly cited in the Clarivate’s Essential Science Indicators (ESI) service. Highly cited papers in ESI are the top 1% in each of the 22 broad fields represented in the Web of Science, per year. They are based on the most recent 10 years of publications.
Highly cited papers are considered indicators of scientific excellence and top performance and can benchmark research performance against subject field baselines worldwide. This is a size-dependent measure.
The percentage of all publications that are in the top 1% most widely referenced papers is 5%: This statistic displays the number of highly referenced papers for an institution divided by the total number of documents produced, expressed as a percentage. It is a measure of excellence that indicates what percentage of an institution’s production is among the most influential articles in the world. This is a size-independent metric.
How were the overall global scores and numerical rankings calculated?
The 2024-2025 overall ranking methodology weighting and factors remain unchanged from the previous edition of the ranking.
Data Collection and Missing Data
The data and metrics used in the ranking were provided by Clarivate. The bibliometric data was based upon the Web of Science.
Publications are limited to those published between the years of 2018 and 2022. However, the citations to those papers come from all publications up to Nov. 30, 2023 for the 2024-2025 rankings, with a publication date in Clarivate’s InCites product of Dec. 15, 2023.
It is necessary to use a slightly older window of publication to allow for citations to accumulate and provide statistically relevant results.
For these rankings, only papers with the document types of articles and reviews were considered; items such as letters, editorials and meeting abstracts were excluded. Conference proceedings from journals in the Web of Science Core Collection are classified as articles and therefore included. However, conference proceedings from the Conference Proceedings Citation Indices are usually excluded. Computer Science is the exception here, where conference proceedings are more commonly used to disseminate academic research and are cited to a reasonable degree.
Best Global Universities rankings data itself comes from InCites. InCites contains all of the Web of Science Core Collection, including the Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Emerging Sources Citation Index, the Conference Proceedings Citation Index for Science and for Social Sciences and Humanities, and the Book Citation Index for Science and for Social Sciences and Humanities for all non-reputation indicators.
University Rankings by Region
After the overall top 2,250 universities rankings were calculated, U.S. News produced additional rankings. The U.S. News Best Global Universities rankings by region show the top institutions in five regions with a large number of globally ranked schools. Those regions are Africa, Asia, Australia/New Zealand, Europe and Latin America. To determine which countries are in which region, we used the U.N. definition of geographical regions.
Universities are ranked in their region based solely on their position in the overall Best Global Universities ranking. For example, the top-ranking European institution, the United Kingdom’s University of Oxford, comes in at No. 4 globally. This overall position also makes the school No. 1 in Europe’s regional ranking. The second highest-ranked university in Europe is the U.K.’s University of Cambridge, which is ranked No. 6 globally, making it No. 2 in Europe.