Victoria amongst top three New Zealand universities

Today Times Higher Education (THE) released its 2015-2016 world university rankings.

The results show that while Victoria remains in third place out of the New Zealand universities we have dropped from the 276-300 band to the 351-400 band.

2015 has been a year of major change for our international ranking systems. As you will be aware the recent QS rankings, in which Victoria moved up 46 places to 229 overall, made significant changes to its methodology in order to normalise citation rates across disciplines. This year, THE also made changes to citation scores by changing from Thomson Reuters to Elsevier's Scopus database – whose 10,000 additional journals include more papers from non-English speaking countries. In addition, its surveys on perceptions of institutional quality were distributed in six additional languages and this year’s rankings include 29 new countries.

These changes have had a negative impact on New Zealand universities with only three—Auckland, Otago and Victoria—now in the top 400 universities worldwide. 

Apart from citations, Victoria’s results are relatively stable across the other areas measured by THE (including teaching and research) and the University will be looking more closely at how we can make sure our performance is appropriately reflected by THE’s new methodology in the future.