by ANGEL CALDERON
QS World University Rankings: The perceived improvement of Australian universities rests primarily on higher citations per-faculty scores. The downside is that the student to faculty ratio for Australian universities continues to worsen year after year.
Australian universities show a relative downward trend in both the academic and employer reputation surveys, with a small but noticeable fall.
We are seeing that universities from the East Asia and Pacific region are making further inroads in the rankings. Malaysia is one example.
Centre for World University Rankings: This combines seven indicators into four dimensions: Quality of education (25 per cent of overall score), alumni employment (25 per cent), quality of faculty (10 per cent) and research performance (40 per cent).
There is no institutional input into the CWUR. Data is drawn from publicly available sources, including bibliometric data from Clarivate and Forbes’ global 2000 public companies.
The methodology used by CWUR combines elements used by several other ranking schemas, particularly the ARWU. This is a ranking that emphasises prestige, because of its reliance on the visibility of awards and recognition of academic and alumni.
Nature Index: Unlike other schemes, Nature Index (from the Nature group) is based on one specific dimension for the world’s top 500 universities.
The Nature Index is a database of author affiliation information collated from research articles published in a selected group of 82 high-quality science journals. The index covers the two journals (Nature and Science) which are pivotal for ranking in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU).
| Standing of Australian universities in Nature Index – top 500 academic institutions, 2016-2020 | ||||||
| Rank –academic | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | Change 2019 – 2020 |
| UNSW | 94 | 81 | 106 | 88 | 86 | Up by |
| Monash | 88 | 75 | 96 | 86 | 87 | Down by 1 |
| Queensland | 64 | 87 | 89 | 68 | 102 | Down by -34 |
| ANU | 107 | 104 | 139 | 119 | 123 | Down by -4 |
| Melbourne | 114 | 112 | 128 | 113 | 125 | Down by -12 |
| Sydney | 157 | 151 | 186 | 175 | 173 | Up 2 |
| UWA | 243 | 317 | 276 | 289 | 261 | Up 28 |
| Wollongong | 384 | 341 | 336 | 394 | 311 | Up 83 |
| Adelaide | 294 | 314 | 302 | 331 | 323 | Up 8 |
| Curtin | 353 | 298 | 354 | 317 | 340 | Down by -23 |
| Macquarie | 407 | 426 | 403 | outside top 500 | 380 | |
| QUT | outside top 500 | outside top 500 | outside top 500 | 384 | 416 | Down by -32 |
| RMIT | 420 | 387 | 459 | 386 | 425 | Down by -39 |
| Griffith | outside top 500 | 416 | 402 | 465 | 436 | Up 29 |
| UTS | outside top 500 | outside top 500 | outside top 500 | 418 | 466 | Down by -48 |
| Note: | ||||||
| Nature revised annual tables after release in June 2019 due to some missing articles. | ||||||