Data is gathered from Web of Science and other sources which provide lists of HEIs. 2500 HEIs with highest number of publications were initially considered, and 2000 of them were ranked after data processing. Reliability of ranking depends mostly on the quality of the data used. In order to provide reliable data, pre-processing and data cleaning techniques were employed.

Statistical analysis indicated that the raw bibliometric data underlying our indicators had highly skewed distributions. Therefore, the indicator values above and below the median are linearly scored in two groups. The Delphi system was conducted with a group of experts to assign weighting scores to the indicators. Total score of 600 is distributed to each indicator as follows:

Number of Articles: % 21
Total Document Count: % 10
Citation: %21
Journal Impact Total: %18
Journal Citation Impact Total: %15
Collaboration: %15

Methodology