Methodology of Impact Rankings 2025

The Times Higher Education Impact Rankings are the world's only global performance tables to rank universities against the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. They utilize calibrated indicators with great care to give clear and well-rounded comparisons on sustainability in four wide-ranging areas: research, stewardship, outreach and teaching. This article overview how universities are ranked, the indicators employed, and why THE Impact Rankings are reliable measures of global university performance on sustainability:

Key principles of Times Higher Education Impact Rankings

Four fundamental pillars of assessment

1. Research: Perhaps the most glaring and conventional manner in which a university can contribute to the SDGs is by producing research on pertinent themes.

2. Stewardship: Universities are guardians of considerable assets; not only physical assets but also their staff, faculty and students. The manner in which they behave as custodians is one of the main drivers of achieving the SDGs.

3. Outreach: Location is important in the higher education sector, and the activity that universities undertake with their national, regional, local and international communities is another important means by which they can be made more sustainable.

4. Teaching: Teaching is central, both to ensuring that there are sufficient skilled practitioners to provide on the SDGs, and to ensuring that all alumni carry forward key lessons of sustainability into future careers.

Which SDGs are covered?

There are 17 UN SDGs:

SDG 1 – No poverty

SDG 2 – Zero hunger

SDG 3 – Good health and well-being

SDG 4 – Quality education

SDG 5 – Gender equality

SDG 6 – Clean water and sanitation

SDG 7 – Affordable and clean energy

SDG 8 – Decent work and economic growth

SDG 9 – Industry, innovation and infrastructure

SDG 10 – Reduced inequalities

SDG 11 – Sustainable cities and communities

SDG 12 – Responsible consumption and production

SDG 13 – Climate action

SDG 14 – Life below water

SDG 15 – Life on land

SDG 16 – Peace, justice and strong institutions

SDG 17 – Partnerships for the goals

Universities can provide data on as many of these SDGs. Every SDG has a set of metrics which are utilized to measure the performance of the university in that SDG. Any university that supplies data on SDG 17 and a minimum of three other SDGs is covered in the overall Impact Rankings table. In addition to the overall ranking, they also release the result of every individual SDG in 17 individual tables.

How are the Impact Rankings structured?

Every SDG ranking is produced from a set of custom indicators and metrics. There are three types of metrics in every SDG:

1. Research metrics are calculated from data provided by Elsevier. For every SDG, there has been developed a particular question that focuses the scope of the metric on papers applicable to said SDG. This is complemented by publications discovered by artificial intelligence. Just like with the World University Rankings, they have applied a five‑year window from 2019 to 2023. The one exception is the patents metric on citing research under SDG 9, which is tied to the publication year of the patents rather than the time window for when the research took place. The bibliometric measures selected for the SDGs vary by SDG and there are always at least two bibliometric indicators employed.

2. Continuous measures quantify contributions to impact that change continuously over a range, for instance, number of graduates with a health-related degree. These are typically normalised to institutional size.

3. While inquiring about policies and initiatives, if there are mentoring programmes the indicators need universities to produce evidence in support of assertions. Here, it generates evidence, and that evidence is publicly available. These indicators are not typically size-normalised. Evidence is assessed on a set of criteria, and choices cross-checked where uncertainty exists. Evidence does not have to be comprehensive, there are examples that prove best practice at the institutions in question.

Calculating the overall ranking

The overall score of a university in a specific year is determined by adding its score on SDG 17 to its highest three scores on the other 16 SDGs. SDG 17 is weighed at 22 per cent of the overall score, while each of the other SDGs is worth 26 per cent. This implies that various universities are ranked based on a different set of SDGs, depending on their area of specialization. The score for the overall ranking is an average of the combined score from the previous two years.

The score in every SDG is normalized so that the top score in every SDG in the overall calculation is 100 and the minimum score is 0. This is to correct for small discrepancies in the range of scoring in every SDG and to make sure that universities are treated fairly irrespective of which SDGs they have submitted data for. They decide what SDGs a university has performed most strongly on; they aren't necessarily the SDGs in which it is ranked highest or scored highest according to unscaled scores.

The ranking is applicable to any university that educates at postgraduate or undergraduate level. While research activity is included in the methodology, there is no minimum research requirement to participate.

THE has the right to exclude universities that are suspected of faking data, or that no longer stand in good standing.

Institutions submit and authenticate their institutional data for use within the rankings. In the exceptional situation when a specific data point is not submitted, THE makes an input of zero.

The Impact Rankings are inherently dynamic: they are growing rapidly each year as many more universities seek to demonstrate their commitment to delivering the SDGs by joining our database; and they allow institutions to demonstrate rapid improvement year-on-year, by introducing clear new policies, for example, or by providing clearer and more open evidence of their progress. Hence, THE anticipate and make frequent changes in the ranked league table of institutions.

- Determine best universities in a particular field of sustainable development

- Understand each institution's focus areas

- Compare sustainability performance with international benchmarks.

- Highlight strengths to recruit global students and partnerships.

The approach was created collaboratively with the partners of THE i.e., Vertigo Ventures and Elsevier, after Consultation and feedback from individual universities, academics and sector groups.