What Does a University’s Rank Really Tell Us?

Times Higher Education (THE) and QS rankings can tell very different stories about the same university. For Pakistan, the bigger question is whether these rankings reflect what matters most: research that translates into innovation, funding and national impact.

Why does the same university sometimes look remarkably different in the Times Higher Education and QS world rankings? The question sounds simple, but the answer reveals something much bigger about the way universities—and increasingly entire higher education systems—measure research. The temptation, whenever a new ranking is released, is to look at the number first. Did the university rise? Did it fall? Who moved ahead? Who slipped behind? Perhaps the more useful question is: what exactly is the ranking measuring? This distinction matters because THE and QS may be working with broadly similar bibliometric data, yet they can tell very different stories about the same institution. At the heart of the difference is a deceptively simple choice: what do you divide research performance by? QS’s Citations per Faculty indicator essentially asks how much cited research is produced in relation to the size of the academic faculty. THE’s research-quality framework, by contrast, places much greater emphasis on how well a university’s publications perform against comparable research worldwide. In other words, one approach places considerable weight on research impact per academic, while the other asks more directly about the citation performance of the research itself.

That difference can matter enormously.

Imagine a specialized science and technology institute with 400 academics producing 4,000 papers over five years. Now compare it with a comprehensive university employing 4,000 academics and producing 20,000 papers. The smaller institution produces far more papers per academic. The larger institution, however, may produce papers that are cited substantially more often. Depending on which question we ask, the same two universities can therefore appear very different. Neither conclusion is necessarily wrong. They are simply answers to different questions. The denominator matters. This is where university leaders should pay particular attention. In a per-faculty system, the definition of faculty becomes important. Should research-only staff, postdocs, clinicians or teaching-focused academics count as faculty? When rankings depend on the denominator, these definitions can change scores without changing research output. Once metrics become targets, institutions adapt to them. Citation patterns also vary sharply across disciplines, while older papers have more time to accumulate citations. Rankings must therefore be interpreted in context.

THE attempts to account for disciplinary and publication differences through field- and year-normalized measures, while QS uses a different methodology, including its Citations per Faculty measure and subject-level approaches. Yet neither should be mistaken for a complete definition of research quality. A citation shows that research has been referenced; it does not necessarily show that the research was correct, transformative, commercially valuable or socially useful.

The problem is that we often count what is easiest to count.

Pakistan’s universities have spent years under pressure to publish. Publication matters: serious research requires peer review, scholarly communication and international visibility. But publication cannot be the destination. A university may produce hundreds of papers without developing a commercially successful technology, accumulate citations without influencing public policy, or improve its ranking without addressing a major problem faced by the society that funds it. So the more important question is not simply: How many papers did our universities publish? It is: What did those papers change?

Did research improve agricultural productivity, reduce industrial costs, develop new materials, medicines or manufacturing processes, improve water or energy security, influence public policy, or generate intellectual property, startups, technology licenses and industry partnerships? These are harder questions to measure. But they are also the questions that matter. For Pakistan, the debate over rankings should therefore become a broader debate about what we expect research to achieve—and how the Higher Education Commission can encourage universities to demonstrate that impact.

HEC’s policy direction already recognizes research quality, innovation, university-industry linkages and commercialization. The next step is to connect these efforts through a funding architecture that rewards not simply research output, but demonstrable value and impact. This does not mean abandoning basic research; fundamental research remains the foundation of many future technologies. But universities should demonstrate how their research contributes to knowledge, human capital, industry, public policy and society. A technology adopted by industry, research that shapes policy, a successful patent or globally influential fundamental research can all represent meaningful impact.

There is nothing wrong with universities caring about QS or THE. Rankings can provide useful benchmarks for research visibility, collaboration and citation performance. But they are indicators, not institutional missions. If funding is tied mechanically to rankings, universities will inevitably organize themselves around ranking methodologies. The smarter approach is to use rankings as one dashboard among many—not the dashboard. For Pakistan, the real challenge is to build a national research ecosystem where HEC, universities, research councils, industry, government and the private sector focus on one question: What public value is being created from our investment in knowledge? This value may be a highly cited paper, patent, startup, new technology, policy reform, better crop variety, affordable medical solution, energy innovation or a researcher who creates future impact. The lesson from THE and QS is that measurement shapes behavior. If we measure only publications or citations, we will optimize for them. But if we measure research quality alongside innovation, relevance, technology transfer, industry engagement and social and economic impact, universities will pursue broader outcomes. Ultimately, research should matter beyond the university, not merely improve its position in a global ranking.

Beyond THE and QS, Pakistan needs a research system that measures not only citations and publications, but what universities actually change.

It will be the answer to a much harder question:

What changed because this university existed?