ITS Research Solution ranks universities on measurable research activity using open scholarly data. This page summarises the method; the full methodology and data sources pages give the detail.
Data sources
Institution identity comes from the Research Organization Registry (ROR). Publication counts, citations, h-index, i10-index, topics and collaboration data come from OpenAlex. Both are open datasets, and every institution page shows its OpenAlex and ROR identifiers and the date its data was last synchronised.
ITS Research Score v3
One formula applies to every ranked institution, using the five most recent complete calendar years:
- 25% research output
- 25% citations
- 20% h-index and 5% i10-index
- 15% citation impact: the institution’s percentile on citations per work, reduced below 500 works so small samples cannot win by chance
- 5% publication growth
- 5% international-collaboration share (when not yet available, the other weights are rescaled)
Volume measures are log-normalised so the largest universities do not dominate linearly. Open-access share and topic diversity are published as separate rankings and do not affect the main score.
Data-quality controls
- The unfinished current year is never counted; the window moves forward each January.
- A year in which an institution’s recorded output jumps to more than three times its usual level while being at least 90% open access is treated as a bulk dataset or repository deposit and scored at the usual level. Raw data are kept and every adjustment is logged.
- Institutions are ranked only when they are active education institutions with enough recent output, at least five active years and several research topics.
Limits
These indicators describe research activity only. They do not measure teaching quality, student experience, employability, reputation or finances. Citation impact is not field-normalised, so fields with different citation habits are not directly comparable. ITS rankings are independent analyses, not official or government rankings, and rankings are never paid placements.
Corrections
If you believe an institution’s data is wrong, please use the contact page and include the institution’s page link. Open scholarly metadata is corrected over time, and each synchronisation updates the figures.