The QS World University Rankings includes 1,127 universities from among the world’s 18,000 in total. Most top rankings have gone to Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT and the University of Oxford.
This year, the ranking covered 46 subjects, and the University of Helsinki provides teaching in 33 of them. The University of Helsinki now ranked among the top 100 in 24 subjects, one more than last year. This year, the University’s ranking for six subjects rose, 17 remained the same as last year and 10 fell.
Of the Broad Subjects in the QS ranking, the University of Helsinki rose the most in Natural Sciences, from 112 last year to 92. The University also improved its ranking in Life Sciences and Medicine – to 68 from 78. Meanwhile, the ranking in Arts and Humanities dropped slightly (to 75 from 67), as did Social Sciences and Management, to 176 from 152 last year.
Of individual subjects, philosophy rose even higher than last year’s excellent ranking, to 25 from 30. Other subjects which improved their ranking included computer science; geography; anthropology; communication and media studies; as well as theology, divinity and religious studies.
The QS bases its definition of subjects and broad subjects on the classifications in the publication platforms of articles and other publications, primarily the Elsevier classifications for English-language journals. These classifications do not directly correspond to the University of Helsinki’s faculties, disciplines or classifications of research fields.
The subject-specific results are based on four components: reputation surveys conducted among 74,000 researchers and 40,000 employers, research citation indices in the Elsevier Scopus database as well as the “h-index”, which is based on the set of an academic’s most cited papers and the number of citations to estimate the impact.
The weighting of the components is not fixed, but rather varies by subject. By varying the weighting of the components, the QS has endeavoured to take into account the differences in publication and citation practices in different fields as well as variations in research methods. For more about the weighting and other methodology, please visit the QS methodology page.
Read the ranking results on the QS website.