World University Rankings 2024 by subject: social sciences methodology

The World University Rankings 2024 by subject will be published at 6am BST on 26 October.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2024 social sciences subject ranking includes a range of narrower subject areas.

The subjects used to create this ranking are:

• Communication and media studies
• Politics and international studies (including development studies)
• Sociology
• Geography

Different weights and measures

The subject tables employ the same range of 18 performance indicators used in the overall World University Rankings 2024, brought together with scores provided under five categories.

However, the overall methodology is carefully recalibrated for each subject, with the weightings changed to suit the individual fields.

The weightings for the social sciences ranking are:

• Teaching: the learning environment
  31.9 per cent
• Research environment: volume, income and reputation
  31.6 per cent
• Research quality: strength, influence and excellence 
  25 per cent
• International outlook: staff, students and research
  7.5 per cent
• Industry: income and patents 
  4 per cent

Criteria

Two criteria determine eligibility for the THE subject rankings: a publication threshold by discipline and an academic staff* threshold by discipline.

No institution can be included in the overall World University Rankings unless it has published a minimum of 1,000 research papers over the five years that we examine (2018-2022 for the 2024 rankings). 

For the 11 subject rankings, the publication thresholds are different. For social sciences, the threshold drops to 200 papers published in this discipline over the five-year period. 

There is also an academic staff eligibility criterion. An institution needs to have either a minimum proportion of its staff or a minimum number of staff in this discipline to be included in the subject ranking.

For social sciences, we expect an institution to have either at least 4 per cent of its academic staff or at least 40 academic staff in the social sciences discipline.

*Academic staff is defined as the full-time equivalent number of staff members employed in an academic post, for example, lecturer, reader or professor.