Should Universities Conduct Research to Improve Their Rankings?

If Research Improves Rankings, Should Rankings Become a Reason to Do Research?

Global rankings matter to many universities. Governments watch them. Prospective students encounter them. International partners may notice them. Institutional leaders discuss them. A rise can become part of university communications, while a decline can generate urgent meetings whose PowerPoint decks acquire increasingly dramatic arrows.

Research also carries substantial weight in major ranking systems. QS currently assigns half of its flagship score to Research and Discovery. Times Higher Education places 29% in Research Environment and another 30% in Research Quality, with research-related indicators appearing elsewhere as well.

It is therefore understandable that universities might invest in research partly because they want to improve their rankings.

The harder question is whether ranking improvement should become the purpose of the research itself. A university exists longer than any ranking methodology, and research can serve scientific, educational, professional, institutional, economic, cultural, and societal purposes that cannot be reduced to league-table performance.

Rankings Can Be a Consideration, but They Are a Poor Primary Research Mission

The Difference Is Between Using Rankings and Serving Rankings

Rankings Can Have Real Institutional Consequences

It would be unrealistic to tell universities simply to ignore global rankings. Rankings are highly visible forms of external comparison and may influence institutional reputation, stakeholder perceptions, international partnerships, student interest, recruitment, and strategic conversations.

For institutions operating in competitive national or international environments, ranking performance can therefore be a legitimate management concern.

A university may reasonably ask why it performs differently from peer institutions, which indicators are weak, and whether those weaknesses reveal underlying areas that deserve attention.

Research Matters Heavily in Major Rankings

The current QS World University Rankings assigns 50% of its score to Research and Discovery: Academic Reputation contributes 30% and Citations per Faculty 20%. International Research Network adds another 5% under Global Engagement.

THE's World University Rankings 2026 assigns 29% to Research Environment and 30% to Research Quality. Research Environment includes Research Reputation, Research Income, and Research Productivity. Research Quality includes Citation Impact, Research Strength, Research Excellence, and Research Influence. International Collaboration and industry-related measures provide additional connections with research activity.

Given these weights, institutions seeking stronger global ranking performance have obvious reasons to examine their research systems.

A Ranking Can Reveal a Genuine Institutional Weakness

Suppose a university discovers that its research productivity is low relative to comparable institutions. Further investigation reveals heavy teaching loads, weak research administration, limited postgraduate research activity, inadequate methods support, and little seed funding.

In this situation, the ranking indicator has identified or highlighted a genuine institutional weakness. Improving the underlying research environment may benefit faculty, students, knowledge production, partnerships, and institutional capability even if the ranking never existed.

Using ranking data diagnostically can therefore be constructive.

A Ranking Can Also Encourage the Wrong Diagnosis

Now imagine that an institution sees a weak citation score and concludes that every faculty member needs a citation target. The indicator has been translated directly into individual behavior without examining how the score is calculated or why citation performance is low.

The real causes might include disciplinary composition, limited international visibility, poor metadata, publication venues not reaching relevant audiences, a small research portfolio, or research topics with modest citation density.

A ranking score identifies an outcome within a measurement system. It does not automatically diagnose the organizational cause.

Ranking Indicators Are Proxies

Rankings cannot directly observe every dimension of university quality. They use indicators intended to represent selected constructs.

Citations may indicate scholarly influence. Research income may indicate resources and competitive funding success. Reputation surveys capture academic perceptions. Publication productivity represents research output relative to defined denominators.

Each can provide useful evidence, but none is the thing itself.

Problems begin when the indicator ceases to serve as evidence about the mission and instead becomes the mission.

Some Ranking-Oriented Investments Are Also Good Research Investments

The distinction does not require universities to avoid every action that could improve a ranking. Many investments have both ranking and substantive value.

These are comparatively robust investments because their value survives methodological changes.

Other Ranking Strategies Can Become Fragile

A fragile strategy is one whose value depends heavily on a particular indicator retaining its current definition and weight.

For example, an institution might restructure incentives narrowly around increasing one publication category because it currently benefits a ranking. If the ranking changes its methodology, the institution may discover that years of policy were optimized for an external formula rather than a durable research objective.

QS states that its weightings are reviewed annually, while THE publishes edition-specific methodology and has revised its indicators over time.

A university strategy should therefore be more stable than the ranking formula it monitors.

Rankings Can Distort Which Research Questions Appear Valuable

Global bibliometric systems tend to make some forms of research more visible than others. Journal-intensive fields, internationally connected topics, and research with large scholarly audiences may generate stronger bibliometric signals than locally focused or less citation-intensive scholarship.

If ranking performance becomes the dominant research objective, institutions may have incentives to shift resources toward research most likely to perform well under the methodology.

This can be strategically rational from the perspective of the ranking while still narrowing the institution's research mission.

Locally Important Research May Have Modest Ranking Value

A study addressing a highly specific regional problem may be extremely useful to a local government, school system, hospital, professional community, or cultural institution while generating relatively few international citations.

The limited ranking return does not make the research less worthwhile. It means the ranking captures only part of its value.

Universities with strong regional or public-service missions should be particularly careful not to allow global visibility to become the sole definition of research contribution.

Rankings Can Influence Researcher Incentives

Institutional ranking strategies eventually reach individual researchers through hiring criteria, promotion rules, workload allocation, publication incentives, funding priorities, and performance targets.

A university may begin with an institutional objective such as improving citation performance. That objective can become a departmental target, then an individual publication requirement, and eventually a reason researchers choose particular topics or journals.

This is where ranking strategy connects with institutional pressure and researcher motivation. External indicators can gradually change not merely how research is evaluated but why researchers do it.

Metric Optimization Can Separate the Score From the Underlying Goal

When a measure becomes consequential, organizations naturally learn how to improve it. Sometimes this is exactly what the measure was intended to encourage. Sometimes performance on the indicator improves faster than the underlying phenomenon.

DORA's guidance cautions that quantitative indicators cannot capture research quality in one number and recommends that they be used with clarity, transparency, specificity, context, and fairness.

The implication for rankings is not that universities should reject metrics. It is that institutional leaders need to ask continually whether actions that improve the score also improve the underlying research.

Ranking Improvement Is Not Guaranteed Even When Research Improves

A university can strengthen research productivity, citations, collaboration, and funding yet remain in the same ranking band because competitors also improve. It can also experience methodological changes that alter the value of particular indicators.

This is why producing more research does not automatically improve a university's ranking.

If research investments are justified only by promised upward movement, genuinely successful research improvements may be judged as failures merely because the ordinal rank did not change.

Rankings and Accreditation Should Not Be Collapsed Into One Institutional Goal

Accreditation and rankings can both influence university strategy, but they serve different functions. Accreditation generally assesses institutions or programs against specified standards. Rankings compare institutions according to selected indicators and weights.

An institution should therefore not assume that a research strategy designed for rankings automatically strengthens accreditation, or vice versa.

This distinction becomes especially important when rankings and accreditation requirements begin influencing institutional research priorities.

A Better Principle Is Mission First, Indicators Second

An institution can begin by identifying what research should accomplish given its mission, disciplines, students, communities, resources, and aspirations. It can then examine whether ranking indicators provide useful evidence about parts of that mission.

This reverses a common pattern. Instead of asking, “What research should we conduct to increase the score?” the institution asks, “What research capability do we need, and what do these external indicators tell us about how well we are developing it?”

The Strongest Ranking Strategy May Be to Build Something Worth Ranking

Universities with durable research strength generally need capable researchers, postgraduate programs, infrastructure, grant support, research governance, partnerships, scholarly networks, and a culture that supports credible inquiry.

These capabilities can improve ranking performance because rankings measure some of their outputs and consequences. But their value is broader.

Building institutional research capacity is therefore a more stable objective than chasing whichever indicator currently offers the easiest numerical gain.

Two Universities Can Pursue the Same Ranking Goal in Very Different Ways

This does not prove that University B will outrank University A. Ranking outcomes remain empirical and relative.

The example illustrates a strategic principle: ranking-compatible research investments are strongest when their institutional value does not depend entirely on the ranking.

Common Misunderstandings About Research for Rankings

Use Rankings as Diagnostic Evidence, Not as the Research Mission

Universities can engage with rankings without allowing rankings to dictate research priorities. The practical distinction lies in how ranking information is translated into institutional action.

A useful institutional test is simple: would this research investment still make sense if QS and THE changed their methodologies substantially next year? If the answer is yes, the institution is probably investing in something more durable than a score.

Before Investing in Research for Ranking Purposes, Check the Institutional Value

Questions About Conducting Research to Improve Rankings

Research Should Be Worth Doing Even When No Ranking Is Watching

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