Highly anticipated Academic Reputation Survey launched

Thomson Reuters today announced it has launched the highly anticipated Academic Reputation Survey, which will help inform the Times Higher Education's influential World University Rankings. The survey reflects a new approach to data gathering and analytics to provide a one-of-a-kind resource to the global scholarly community.

A unique feature of the Thomson Reuters Academic Reputation Survey is an opportunity for disciplinary focus: academics will highlight what they believe to be the strongest universities in their specific fields, both in teaching and research. With the ability to select from hundreds of disciplines and over 6,000 academic institutions, scholars will have great latitude in pinpointing their reputational assessment.

"Researcher engagement is critical to ensuring that this new initiative delivers what the industry has long been asking for -- a more accurate representation of the institutional landscape, from the source," said Jonathan Adams, director of research evaluation at Thomson Reuters. "The survey results, combined with clear methodology, will provide the community with a thorough, accurate, and multi-faceted data source to support institutional assessment, comparisons and rankings."

Participants of the survey have been carefully selected from Thomson Reuters internal databases and supplemented by a third-party source for balanced coverage of disciplines and geographic regions. The survey will represent thousands of researchers, university administrators, and students worldwide. Their responses will provide the most reliable and accurate representation of academic viewpoints used in the World University Rankings' seven year history.  

The Academic Reputation Survey is part of the Thomson Reuters Global Institutional Profiles Project. The initiative will create data-driven profiles of globally significant research institutions -- combining reputational feedback, scholarly outputs, citation patterns, funding levels, and faculty characteristics across disciplines in one comprehensive database. The dataset can be packaged and analyzed to different specifications, giving organizations custom information for evaluating and benchmarking their performance and supporting efforts to secure research funding.