The inaugural U.S. News Best Arab Region Universities rankings are the first in-depth assessment of schools in the region. This 1.0 version of the rankings is the beginning of a long-term project to develop surveys and rankings for the region.
U.S. News believes that the 2015 Best Arab Region Universities rankings will allow prospective students, parents, policymakers and employers in the region to accurately compare institutions – something that had not been possible in the past due to a lack of standardized educational data. Arab region universities will also be able to use these rankings as a way to benchmark themselves against schools in their own country and region and discover top schools from other countries to collaborate with.
The rankings – which are based on bibilometric data and research metrics provided by Scopus, part of the Elsevier Research Intelligence portfolio – focus specifically on institutions' academic research output and performance and not their separate undergraduate or graduate programs.
Scopus is Elsevier’s abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, covering 55 million documents published in more than 21,900 journals, book series and conference proceedings by more than 5,000 publishers. For the Best Arab Region Universities rankings, the Scopus database was aggregated for universities in the Arab region by school and subject.
The first step in producing the overall rankings was to determine which of the 800-plus Arab region universities would be eligible to be included in the analysis. U.S. News worked with bibliometric experts at Elsevier to set the analytical time period for the rankings: papers published in the five-year period from 2009 through 2013. This time period was chosen since many Arab region universities have only recently begun emphasizing the importance of their faculty publishing in journals and engaging in research.
Since various publication metrics were the sole basis of the overall Best Arab Region Universities rankings, U.S. News decided that to be included and ranked, an Arab region university had to have 400 or more total publications tracked by Scopus, meaning an average of 80 papers per year in the five-year period.
This publication threshold is well below the one used to determine eligibility for the U.S. News Best Global Universities rankings of the top research institutions worldwide; however, it was considered high enough to be the basis for a sophisticated, comparative analysis of publications and citations in the Arab region.
As a result of setting the threshold at 400 or more total papers, 91 schools were included in the overall rankings.
Papers published by Arab region institutions in the subject area of physics and astronomy were excluded based on input from Elsevier's bibliometric experts, who determined that their citation characteristics would distort the results of the overall rankings. There is, however, a separate subject ranking for physics and astronomy that is based on papers published exclusively in those fields.
Branch campuses in the Arab region that are operated by a parent university in another country were not considered for these rankings.
The second step was to calculate the rankings for the 91 universities using the nine ranking indicators and weights that U.S. News chose to measure research output and performance; all indicators were based on the 2009-2013 period. The weights emphasize, in nearly equal proportions, the importance of getting published in peer-reviewed journals; getting those publications cited by other researchers in their work; and having a paper be highly cited in its field.
Each school's profile page on usnews.com lists numerical ranks, out of 91, for the nine indicators, allowing students to compare each school's standing in each indicator. The indicators and their weights in the ranking formula are listed in the table below, with related indicators grouped together; an explanation of each follows
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